A diver from Ireland named Dorian Borcherds recently recorded a video of a peculiar-appearing jellyfish off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The jellyfish was visible in groups of three or four, and the diver was astounded by their intricate pattern and how steadily they seemed to move in the water.
Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin, a jellyfish expert at Australian Marine Stinger Advisory Services, submitted the video on the Jellyfish app to find an answer after he emailed the video to his wife in South Africa with hundreds of queries. According to Fontoura news, the doctor acknowledged that it was difficult for her to contain her excitement when she first saw the jellyfish.
Instead of her initial belief that the clip was the second sighting of the enigmatic jellyfish known as Chirodectes maculatus, as per a notion that was discovered decades ago on the Great Barrier Reef, Gershwin now thinks the stunning creature is a new species. Although she is confident in her findings, she has not yet had her study for the species classification reviewed.
Prof. Kylie Pitt, a marine scientist and another expert on jellyfish, speculated that it might be a new species, but she doesn’t think it would be possible to tell from a video. She acknowledged that she had never seen anything like it, though.
On the other hand, she asserted that it was Chirodectes maculatus, as per Gershwin, that was observed once in 1997 in north Queensland. She helped her along with Peter Davie, a retired but active curator from the Queensland Museum. ‘We both watched the video closely and noted the technical changes as well as the fact that the jellyfish was larger than what could fit in our hands, about the size of a soccer ball.’ In the end, they came to the same conclusion that it was a new species, probably belonging to the same genus as the one first discovered in 1997.
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