The Book of Animal Ignorance by Ted Dewan Page B

ability to be ‘reborn from the ground’ cicadas have come to represent resurrection and immortality in many cultures. In Taoism, they are symbols of tsien , the soul which leaves the body at death.
    In ancient Greece, they were kept as pets. Plato tells a story of how they were once men whose devotion to music was so great that they wasted away, leaving only their music behind. Aristotle, on the other hand, was fond of eating them fried. Cicadas are still eaten across Asia and Africa and in Australia. Native Americans deep fry them and eat them like popcorn. They are surprisingly meaty and taste like asparagus.

Comb Jelly
    Gooseberries with lovely eyelashes
    A round 550 million years ago, animal life came in just four varieties: worms, sponges, jellyfish and comb jellies. The worms splintered into many different branches but the sponges and the jellies have changed little.

    Early naturalists couldn’t decide if they were animals or not, so Linnaeus compromised by grouping them together as zoophytes or ‘animal plants’. Comb jellies are particularly plant-like to look at and their common names – sea gooseberry, sea walnut, melon jelly – have a distinct fruit & veg flavour. But they are unquestionably animals, and carnivores at that – gobbling up crustaceans, small fish and one another with what looks like single-minded dedication. Yet they have no brain – and no heart, eyes, ears, blood or bones, either. They are just a lot of mouth.
    Most comb jellies are spherical or bell-shaped, ranging in size from no wider than a matchstick to longer than a man’s arm. 95 per cent of a comb jelly is water; the rest is made of mesoglea (‘middle glue’), a fibrous collagen gel that acts as muscle and skeleton rolled into one. To the casual observer, they look a lot like jellyfish: in fact the two are from completely different phyla and about as closely related to each other as human beings are to starfish.
    Comb jellies are one of the ocean’s most ethereal sights. The beating of the cilia diffracts the light, making the combs look like eight shimmering rainbows .
    The comb jelly phylum is called Ctenophora (pronounced ‘teen-o-fora’) from the Greek ktenos , comb, and phora , carry. Unlike jellyfish, which propel themselves by contracting their bodies, ctenophores move by rhythmically beating their eight ‘combs’ – rows ofmany thousands of hair-like cilia (Greek for ‘eyelashes’). Also unlike jellyfish, comb jellies don’t sting. Instead, they have long, retractable tentacles covered in colloblasts , special cells that exude sticky mucus to trap their prey. They also have anal pores (real jellyfish use their mouths as bottoms) which nestle next to a gravity-sensing organ called a statocyst that tells them which way is up. While jellyfish can regenerate a missing tentacle, half a comb jelly regenerates into a whole animal. Comb jellies also have a simpler reproductive system. Most are hermaphrodites, capable of producing eggs and sperm at the same time (up from the gonads, out through the mouth) and – theoretically – of fertilising themselves. They generally just release thousands of eggs and sperm into the water. Their young can breed as soon as they hatch.
    Comb jellies are thought to be more numerous than any other creature of their size or larger. They aren’t great swimmers and are frequently swept into great, dramatic swarms, which pose a devastating threat to fishermen.
    BEROE’S BLIND DATE
    The collapse of commercial fishing in the Black Sea in the 1990s has been blamed on an American comb jelly, Mnemiopsis leidyi , that arrived as a stowaway in a US ship’s ballast tank. Now known as ‘the Monster’, it can produce 8,000 offspring a day. The Black Sea population weighs over a billion tons, hoovering up all the plankton that once fed the local anchovies. ‘The Monster’ has also invaded the Caspian,