SCIENTISTS DISCOVER A NEW JELLYFISH SPECIES AND FAMILY – “PINK
MEANIE’ MAKES COVER OF BIOLOGICAL BULLETIN Jan 10, 2011 Dauphin
Island Sea Lab scientist Dr. Keith Bayha, while working
alongside Dr. Michael Dawson at the University of California
Merced, has discovered that the jellyfish Drymonema, commonly
called the ‘pink meanie’ in the Gulf of Mexico, represents not
only a new species of jellyfish, but also a new family, based on
DNA evidence and morphological analyses. This discovery has made
the most recent cover story of the journal Biological Bulletin
(http://www.biolbull.org/content/vol219/issue3/cover.shtml). The
scientists have named the new species, which occurs in the Gulf
of Mexico and Caribbean, Drymonema larsoni, after the scientist
Ronald J. Larson, who pioneered work on this animal in the
1980’s. The new family, Drymonematidae, is the first new
scyphozoan or “true jellyfish” family since 1921 and covers
similar species in the Mediterranean Sea and South America.
“It’s rare that something like th