March 18, 2016 at 01:32AM

Today I Learned: 1) If you cut the mouth out of the center of a jellyfish, the hole closes up without a mouth. The jellyfish will continue to swim around and do all of its normal jellyfish behaviors... except that it has no mouth, so it cannot eat. Apparently they will live for quite a while by cannibalizing their mesoglia, which is the jelly-like stuff that makes up most of a jellyfish's bulk. As they consume mesoglia, they gradually shrink and shrink and shrink until one day they just kind of disappear, presumably having dissolved away. Jellyfish are weird. All of the above has been observed by Mengsha Gong for moon jellies. I have no idea how well it generalizes to other jellyfish. 2) Speaking of jellyfish being weird, jellyfish muscles are *super* weird. Instead of the long, separate, multinucleate muscle fiber cells common to most animals (today I learned that muscle fiber cells are long and multinucleated!), jellyfish muscles are Also thanks to Mengsha Gong on this one. 3) Apparently "apoptosis" is pronounced just about the way it's spelled. When I was first getting into the whole science thing at the NIH, one of my mentors insisted that it was pronounced "ah-poh-toh-sis" (first letter pronounced like the 'a' in 'apple'), specifically with the second 'p' silent. I trusted him on this, but apparently most authorities on the English language (Mirriam-Webster, for instance) keep the 'p' pronounced. I feel like I've been living a lie my whole life.