Chad Widmer is one of the world’s most accomplished jellyfish cultivators. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, he is lord of the “Drifters” exhibit, a slow-motion realm of soft edges, rippling flute music and sapphire light. His left ankle is crowded with tattoos, including Neptune’s trident and a crystal jellyfish. A senior aquarist, Widmer labors to figure out how jellyfish thrive in captivity—a job that involves untangling tentacles and plucking gonads until his arm is swollen with venom.
Widmer has bred dozens of jellyfish species, including moon jellies, which resemble animated shower caps. His signature jelly is the Northeast Pacific sea nettle, displayed by the score in a 2,250-gallon exhibit tank. They are orange and incandescent, like dollops of lava, and when they swim against the current they look like glowing meteors streaming to Earth.
The waters of Monterey Bay have not been spared from the gelatinous woes said to be sweeping the oceans. “It used to be that everything had a season,” Widmer says. Spring was the time for lobed comb jellies and crystal jellies to arrive. But for the past five years or so, those species seem to be materializing almost at random. The orange spotted comb jelly, which Widmer nicknamed the “Christmas jelly,” no longer peaks in December; it haunts the shoreline practically year-round. Black sea nettles, once seen mostly in Mexican waters, have started appearing off Monterey. Last August, millions of Northeast Pacific sea nettles bloomed in Monterey Bay and clogged the aquarium’s seawater intake screen. The nettles typically retreat by early winter. “Well,” Widmer informs me gravely on my February visit, “they’re still out there.”