Small reef fish uses venomous Moon Jellyfish in brilliant way

The Moon Jellyfish is a highly venomous ocean predator that swims along capturing prey with its tentacles and then consuming them. It eats plankton, mollusks and small fish by pulling them in and digesting them inside its transparent body. These creatures have a painful sting, deadly to small creatures, and most animals will avoid the jellyfish at all costs. Although they are simple organisms, incapable of complex thought, their construction has made them very effective at surviving for millions of years with little need to evolve.Show more

This scuba diver saw a Moon Jellyfish the size of a small dinner plate pulsating and moving through the water above the reef off Little Cayman Island. He approached to film the beautiful and mysterious creature as it swam.

What the scuba diver saw when he got close was that a small fish was inside the Moon Jellyfish, apparently being consumed. This made the diver even more fascinated and he moved around the jellyfish as he filmed. Horrified, he could see that the little fish was actually alive and moving inside the jellyfish. Nature can be harsh and it appeared that the fish had just been captured and would be slowly and painfully killed.

Surprisingly, the fish began swimming in and out of the jellyfish. He was even positioning himself on the opposite side of the dangerous predator in order to avoid the scuba diver. What became obvious was that the tiny and defenseless fish understood that large predators must avoid the painful sting of the jellyfish and he was using this knowledge to avoid being eaten.

The inhabitants of the ocean use many means of survival, including forming useful relationships with other creatures in order to obtain food or to avoid becoming food themselves. Amazingly, the reef fish was able to avoid the stings of the trailing jellyfish tentacles that would undoubtedly be fatal for him.