Fatal Attraction : Professor Devotes His Life to Tracking the Deadly but Lovely Jellyfish

The northern coast of Australia has 6,000 miles of the world’s most beautiful beaches, but you won’t see many swimmers.

Drifting through the calm offshore waters is an animal that strikes more fear than sharks. Each year, it kills one or two people and seriously injures many more.

Its weapon--among the most potent and fastest-acting venoms, concealed in up to 500 feet of tentacles--can stop an adult heart in three minutes if the amount is large enough; smaller quantities can suppress breathing.

Ironically, this creature--the whimsically named box jelly--is among the world’s most beautiful, a combination that proved irresistible to UCLA Prof. Bill Hamner.

Considered a leading jellyfish expert, Hamner has studied the lifestyles of jellies for two decades. Along the way, he has pioneered a circular tank that helps keep the gelatinous creatures thriving in captivity. So when the Great Barrier Reef Aquarium in Townsville, Australia, decided to exhibit the box jelly--also known as the sea wasp--its curator called on Hamner.

One favorite repast of the jellies is the tiger prawn, which they eliminate in their new tank without a hint of a struggle.

“With a little touch of the tentacle, this delicate-bodied four-inch box jelly kills the highly armored, spiky, eight-inch prawn instantly,” marvels Hamner, who is clearly smitten with these mysterious sea creatures.

“We got them feeding and killing things,” Hamner says proudly. “It was great.”

At a time when jellyfish are taking a more prominent place in the universe--they actually are being sent into space--Bill Hamner is in the right place at the right time.

His passion for jellyfish began during his college days at Yale, when he worked with the animals in a neurophysicist’s lab. The Long Beach native went on to study the reproductive biology of birds, but after 12 years he developed an allergy to feathers.

He decided to go back to jellyfish.

“Jellyfish are among the simplest of the multicellular animals, so they don’t have the ability to make fancy equipment like muscles and organs,” he explains. “They still manage to do all sorts of fabulous things.”

Although primitive in structure, jellyfish come in a rainbow of colors, shapes and sizes. They can range from the tiny transparent hydromedusae, a quarter of an inch in diameter, to the lion’s mane jellyfish, longer than 100-foot blue whale, including tentacles.

Adult jellyfish are called medusae after the mythological snake-haired woman who could paralyze humans and change them into stone. Stingers like box jellies and the Portuguese man-of-war get most of the attention, but only a few dozen of the estimated 500 species can hurt humans.

Clearly, jellyfish have an image problem. They are seen as shapeless blobs marring the beaches. Yet during their 650 million years of existence, they’ve remained a picture of grace and beauty.

Enter Hamner and other scientists, who are looking to these ancient animals for insights into our own physiology.

Last summer, in a NASA laboratory eight miles from Cape Canaveral, biologist Dorothy Spangenberg readied 2,500 moon jellies for the Columbia space shuttle. Traveling in Pyrex casserole dishes, the unusual crew members were part of an experiment to understand calcium loss in space.

The second jellyfish mission is slated for 1994 aboard the International Microgravity Lab. A new instrument will measure how much gravity the animals need to develop normally.

Although it’s a big jump from moon jellies to astronauts, Spangenberg is looking for cellular similarities.

“The gravity receptors of both the human inner ear and jellyfish share certain characteristics, and their sensory cells are similar to the hair cells of mammals,” she says. Although technically jellyfish have no organs, their nerve and muscle networks might also relate to those of mammals.

It’s the need to know these fascinating creatures that has led Hamner and his wife of 32 years, Peggy, to the oceans and lakes around the world. The couple took their two sons on their expeditions; on long trips, they also took a tutor for the boys.

In 1971, on a trip to Bimini in the Bahamas, the Hamners first used their trademark approach, open ocean diving.

For years, marine biologists had tried unsuccessfully to study the fragile jellyfish by netting them. Hamner and his team of graduate students jumped off their rubber raft with scuba gear, clipboards and collecting jars. At a depth of 80 feet, they observed jellyfish and other plankton undisturbed in the blue water of the Gulf Stream.

A few years later, on their way back from Australia, the family stopped at Palau in the western Pacific. They wound up staying three years. Because the Palauans considered the archipelago of 80 lakes to be taboo, their contents were a mystery. The Hamners changed that.

“Each lake was a world-class adventure,” Hamner recalls. “One time I thought Peggy was snorkeling next to me, and it turned out to be a New Guinea saltwater crocodile.” During a night dive, they saw 30 pairs of tiny eyes staring at them--a group of curious young crocs.

Although box jelly is his pet research, it was the discovery of the Mastigias jellyfish of Palau that established Hamner as one of the country’s leading jellyfish experts.

On various dives during 1979 and ‘80, Hamner found that the water was swarming with large, golden Mastigias that were both beautiful and perplexing. Three forms of Mastigias inhabited three lakes and migrated from shore to shore twice daily.

For unknown reasons, the animals made their departures in different directions. And unlike many other jellyfish, which catch prey with tentacles, Mastigias rely on tiny algae living inside their tissue for food.

In a 1982 National Geographic article, Hamner described the lakes’ saltwater ecosystems, caves the length of two football fields, massive stalactites and tunnels.

From Palau, the Hamners journeyed to the south polar seas, where they spent three summers studying krill, the primary food in the Antarctic food chain.

“Everyone thought they were individual planktonic animals, uniformly distributed,” says Hamner. Instead the reddish, thumb-length crustaceans swim in dense schools. “They think they are sardines,” he adds.

While studying box jellies, Mastigias and krill, Hamner found that his animals needed a home that would be jellyfish-friendly.

The goal of a tank is to recreate an environment with no walls, corners or air bubbles to damage the fragile residents. In addition, the tank must allow water to drain without squashing the jellyfish, which are 95% water themselves.

As a result of Hamner’s research and tank engineering, jellyfish are finally finding their place on the aquarium circuit.

This month’s the Monterey Bay Aquarium opens “Planet of the Jellies.” Aquarists there are convinced that the animal’s nasty reputation will change when people see 17 species pulsing gracefully to music.

Inspired by Monterey’s successes, the Waikiki Aquarium on Honolulu opens its own jellyfish exhibit next month. Three species of island jellyfish are featured as well as the BBC film, “Lost World of the Medusa,” filmed in Palau after Hamner’s work.

For now, Hamner is home, writing a paper on the box jelly, directing UCLA’s Marine Science Center and anxious to explore local waters from a new 40-foot UCLA research vessel.

And recently this sea-faring world traveler had a dry-land adventure: He dove into a lecture hall inhabited by 800 undergrads.