Aurelia (cnidarian)

Aurelia
Adult Aurelia aurita medusa
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Cnidaria
Class: Scyphozoa
Order: Semaeostomeae
Family: Ulmaridae
Genus: Aurelia
Lamarck, 1816
Species

Aurelia is a genus of jellyfish that are commonly called moon jellies, which are in the class Scyphozoa. There are currently 25 accepted species and many that are still not formally described.[1][2][3]

The genus was first described in 1816 by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his book Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres (Natural History of Invertebrates).[4] It has been suggested that Aurelia is the best-studied group of gelatinous zooplankton, with Aurelia aurita the best-studied species in the genus; two other species, Aurelia labiata and Aurelia limbata were also traditionally investigated throughout the 20th century.[5] In the early 2000s, studies that considered genetic data showed that diversity in Aurelia was higher than expected based solely on morphology,[6][7] so one cannot confidently attribute the results from most of the previous studies to the species named. More recently, studies have highlighted the morphological variability[2] (including the potential for phenotypic plasticity[8][9]) in this genus, emphasizing the difficulty of identifying cryptic species.[10]

Species of Aurelia can be found in the Atlantic, Arctic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and seem to be more common in temperate regions, such as in the waters off northern China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, the northeastern and northwestern coasts of the United States, and those of northern Europe.[2]

Aurelia undergoes alternation of generations, whereby the sexually-reproducing pelagic medusa stage is either male or female, and the benthic polyp stage reproduces asexually. Meanwhile, life cycle reversal, in which polyps are formed directly from juvenile and sexually mature medusae or their fragments, was also observed in Aurelia coerulea (= Aurelia sp. 1).[11]

Two Aurelia aurita in Gullmarn fjord, Sweden
  1. ^ Collins, A. G.; Jarms, G.; Morandini, A. C. (September 12, 2021). "World List of Scyphozoa. Aurelia Lamarck, 1816". WoRMS. World Register of Marine Species. Retrieved September 12, 2021.
  2. ^ a b c Lawley, J. W.; Gamero-Mora, E.; Maronna, M. M.; Chiaverano, L. M.; Stampar, S. N.; Hopcroft, R. R.; Collins, A. G.; Morandini, A. C. (2021). "The importance of molecular characters when morphological variability hinders diagnosability: systematics of the moon jellyfish genus Aurelia (Cnidaria: Scyphozoa)". PeerJ. 9:e11954: e11954. doi:10.7717/peerj.11954. PMC 8435205. PMID 34589293.
  3. ^ Brown, M.; Scorrano, S.; Kuplik, Z.; Kuyper, D.; Ras, V.; Thibault, D.; Engelbrecht, A.; Gibbons, M. J. (2021). "A new macromedusa from the coast of Mozambique: Aurelia mozambica sp. nov. (Scyphozoa: Ulmaridae)". Zootaxa. 4933 (2): 263–276. doi:10.11646/zootaxa.4933.2.5. hdl:10566/6168. PMID 33756798. S2CID 232339936.
  4. ^ Lamarck, J.-B. M. de. (1816). "Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres". www.biodiversitylibrary.org. Verdière: Biodiversity Heritage Library. Archived from the original on 2014-05-13. Retrieved 23 June 2021.
  5. ^ Arai, Mary Needler. A Functional Biology of Scyphozoa. London: Chapman and Hall. pp. 68–206.
  6. ^ Schroth, Werner; Jarms, Gerhard; Streit, Bruno; Schierwater, Bernd (2 January 2002). "Speciation and phylogeography in the cosmopolitan marine moon jelly, Aurelia sp". BMC Evolutionary Biology. 2: 1. doi:10.1186/1471-2148-2-1. PMC 64640. PMID 11801181.
  7. ^ Dawson, Michael N (2003). "Macro-morphological variation among cryptic species of the moon jellyfish, Aurelia (Cnidaria: Scyphozoa)". Marine Biology. 143 (2): 369–379. Bibcode:2003MarBi.143..369D. doi:10.1007/s00227-003-1070-3. S2CID 189820003.
  8. ^ Chiaverano, Luciano M.; Bayha, Keith W.; Graham, William M. (2016-06-22). Colgan, Donald James (ed.). "Local versus Generalized Phenotypes in Two Sympatric Aurelia Species: Understanding Jellyfish Ecology Using Genetics and Morphometrics". PLOS ONE. 11 (6): e0156588. Bibcode:2016PLoSO..1156588C. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0156588. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 4917110. PMID 27332545.
  9. ^ Chiaverano, Lm; Graham, Wm (2017-11-06). "Morphological plasticity in Aurelia polyps, with subsequent effects on asexual fecundity and morphology of young medusae". Marine Ecology Progress Series. 582: 79–92. Bibcode:2017MEPS..582...79C. doi:10.3354/meps12314. ISSN 0171-8630. S2CID 90233141.
  10. ^ Lawley, Jonathan W.; Gamero-Mora, Edgar; Maronna, Maximiliano M.; Chiaverano, Luciano M.; Stampar, Sérgio N.; Hopcroft, Russell R.; Collins, Allen G.; Morandini, André C. (2022-09-29). "Morphology is not always useful for diagnosis, and that's ok: Species hypotheses should not be bound to a class of data. Reply to Brown and Gibbons (S Afr J Sci. 2022;118(9/10), Art. #12590)". South African Journal of Science. 118 (9/10). doi:10.17159/sajs.2022/14495. ISSN 1996-7489. S2CID 252562185.
  11. ^ He, Jinru; Zheng, Lianming; Zhang, Wenjing; Lin, Yuanshao; Steele, Robert E. (21 December 2015). "Life Cycle Reversal in Aurelia sp.1 (Cnidaria, Scyphozoa)". PLOS ONE. 10 (12): e0145314. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1045314H. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145314. PMC 4687044. PMID 26690755.