The Misses is feeling Jelly

[Jeremey’s reef]

Hello everyone today my lady proposed the idea of having Jellyfish in our reef rank. Has anyone here wvery kept a jelly fish in a reef or does this require a separate setup? No doubt this would catch the interest of our daughter but I’ve only seen one video via YouTube of two Jellyfish in a reef tank. Could this work?

 

[Doberman13]

I saw on reddit that some guy had a tiny jelly fish hitchhiker in his reef tank. Never heard of anyone putting one in intentionally

 

[ActiveAngel]

Jellyfish are not able to swim very well, even less strongly than seahorses. Additionally, their bodies are very weak and delicate; even touching the ground, glass, or each other can potentially rip their bodies into shreds. For these reasons, jellies often require specialized tanks that circulated flow in specific patterns, until recently these were obscenely expensive on the order of $10-100k+. That said, even the new and cheap ‘desktop jellyfish tanks’ are great ideas in theory, but consistently fail in practice. Hopefully this design can be refined soon. Finally, best case scenario, many jellies have a lifespan of about 1-2 years. (We can ignore that many species fall into categories that have extreme temperature requirements, grow obscenely large, or can be incredibly dangerous. For example, Moon Jellies are fairly popular, harmless, reasonably sized, and cheap)

I don’t mean to discourage you with all this news. But there is a reason people haven’t done it before. People always find jellyfish to be beautiful; and they have been trying, but even dedicated tanks are an extreme rarity.

In general, you’d be trying to design a tank with medium to high flow that also has almost no flow whatsoever. With live rock and corals, but also with absolutely no rock or corals.

 

[ActiveAngel]

And unfortunately, they are also indiscriminate predators that exist at the bottom of the food chain. As such, many things will eat them as their favorite food (basically a floating meat bag, with no bones, that can’t swim away), while simultaneously they may eat a large variety of species. This is similar to cephalopods like squids, cuttlefish, and octopus.

So while it is about as clear-cut “it will not work” more so than any other marine species... it’s up to you if you want to try and pioneer a new field. But you may be working against yourself. I’d be curious if anybody that has done it, like those people you’ve mentioned, which species of jelly they have, and how long it survived.

It would be much easier to design a reef tank with sea horses or pipefish. Which would still be relatively unique and beautiful! My favorite would be the Dragon Faced pipefish

 

[Jeremey’s reef]

And unfortunately, they are also indiscriminate predators that exist at the bottom of the food chain. As such, many things will eat them as their favorite food (basically a floating meat bag, with no bones, that can’t swim away), while simultaneously they may eat a large variety of species. This is similar to cephalopods like squids, cuttlefish, and octopus.

So while it is about as clear-cut “it will not work” more so than any other marine species... it’s up to you if you want to try and pioneer a new field. But you may be working against yourself. I’d be curious if anybody that has done it, like those people you’ve mentioned, which species of jelly they have, and how long it survived.

It would be much easier to design a reef tank with sea horses or pipefish. Which would still be relatively unique and beautiful! My favorite would be the Dragon Faced pipefish

I am a huge fan of the dragon faced pipe fish as well my friend, but seeing as I’m going for a LPS dominant reef tank I don’t see seahorses as an option and will deliver the bad news to the misses “no jellyfish”