14 DAY TRIAL // The Dallas Zoo and Children's Aquarium at Fair Park in Texas, US is now home to several dozen jellyfish that are brown not because they like sunbathing a tad too much, but because they have been feasting on peanut butter ever since they were fairly young.
P. Zelda Montoya and Barrett L. Christie explain that they decided to put the jellyfish on this peculiar diet simply because they were curious about what would happen should such creatures be allowed to eat peanut butter.
“We would love to claim we conducted this trial with noble purpose, but the truth is that we just wanted to make peanut butter and jellyfish simply to see if it could be done,” the aquarists write in the Drum and Croaker journal.
“Whether or not it should be done is a question no doubt to be debated by philosophers for the ages (or at least by some aquarists over beer),” they go on to explain.
The aquarists go on to detail that, as part of their experiment, they collected some 250 young moon jellyfish, and placed them inside a container.
They then fed them peanut butter twice a day for about five weeks in a row, and closely monitored their development, CBS reports.
Apart from the fact that they turned slightly brown, a feature that P. Zelda Montoya and Barrett L. Christie attribute to a high degree of peanutbutterocity, the moon jellyfish did not appear to be all that affected by the fact that their diet did not include fish- and/or shrimp-based proteins.
Thus, the aquarists say that, though a bit slower, their growth rate was not worlds apart from that of jellyfish fed a more conventional diet.
This experiment might sound like a waste of time but, given the fact that ocean resources are not as plentiful as they used to be, it might not be such a bad idea to find alternative and sustainable feeding options from creatures kept in captivity at aquariums.