Aurelia
2 species
Aurelia is a genus of jellyfish that are commonly called moon jellies, which are in the class Scyphozoa. There are currently 25 accepted species and many that are still not formally described.
The genus was first described in 1816 by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his book Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres (Natural History of Invertebrates). It has been suggested that Aurelia is the best-studied group of gelatinous zooplankton, with Aurelia aurita the best-studied species in the genus; two other species, Aurelia labiata and Aurelia limbata were also traditionally investigated throughout the 20th century. In the early 2000s, studies that considered genetic data showed that diversity in Aurelia was higher than expected based solely on morphology, so one cannot confidently attribute the results from most of the previous studies to the species named. More recently, studies have highlighted the morphological variability (including the potential for phenotypic plasticity) in this genus, emphasizing the difficulty of identifying cryptic species.
Species of Aurelia can be found in the Atlantic, Arctic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and seem to be more common in temperate regions, such as in the waters off northern China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the northeastern and northwestern coasts of the United States, and those of northern Europe.
Aurelia undergoes alternation of generations, whereby the sexually-reproducing pelagic medusa stage is either male or female, and the benthic polyp stage reproduces asexually. Meanwhile, life cycle reversal, in which polyps are formed directly from juvenile and sexually mature medusae or their fragments, was also observed in Aurelia coerulea (= Aurelia sp. 1).
Aurelia is a genus of jellyfish that are commonly called moon jellies, which are in the class Scyphozoa. There are currently 25 accepted species and many that are still not formally described.
The genus was first described in 1816 by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his book Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres (Natural History of Invertebrates). It has been suggested that Aurelia is the best-studied group of gelatinous zooplankton, with Aurelia aurita the best-studied species in the genus; two other species, Aurelia labiata and Aurelia limbata were also traditionally investigated throughout the 20th century. In the early 2000s, studies that considered genetic data showed that diversity in Aurelia was higher than expected based solely on morphology, so one cannot confidently attribute the results from most of the previous studies to the species named. More recently, studies have highlighted the morphological variability (including the potential for phenotypic plasticity) in this genus, emphasizing the difficulty of identifying cryptic species.
Species of Aurelia can be found in the Atlantic, Arctic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and seem to be more common in temperate regions, such as in the waters off northern China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the northeastern and northwestern coasts of the United States, and those of northern Europe.
Aurelia undergoes alternation of generations, whereby the sexually-reproducing pelagic medusa stage is either male or female, and the benthic polyp stage reproduces asexually. Meanwhile, life cycle reversal, in which polyps are formed directly from juvenile and sexually mature medusae or their fragments, was also observed in Aurelia coerulea (= Aurelia sp. 1).
