Box jellyfish can see above the water

Those jellyfish may be watching you.

ScienceDaily
(Apr. 30, 2011) — Box jellyfish may seem like rather simple creatures, but in fact their visual system is anything but. They've got no fewer than 24 eyes of four different kinds. Now, researchers reporting online on April 28 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have evidence revealing that four of those eyes always peer up out of the water, regardless of the way the rest of the animal is oriented. What's more, it appears that those eyes allow the jellies to navigate their way around the mangrove swamps in which they live.

"It is a surprise that a jellyfish -- an animal normally considered to be lacking both brain and advanced behavior -- is able to perform visually guided navigation, which is not a trivial behavioral task," said Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen. "This shows that the behavioral abilities of simple animals, like jellyfish, may be underestimated."