A new type of jellyfish found in Rovinj

A new type of jellyfish from the genus Aurelia was described for science and confirmed by genetic methods by scientists from the Institute for the Sea and Coast of the University of Dubrovnik, based on one individual found in Rovinj in the summer of 2020.

That university announced on Tuesday that a new species of jellyfish was found during the stay of their scientists in the Evolutionary Ecology Laboratory of the Center for Marine Research of the "Ruđer Bošković" Institute, so the discovery of the new species was confirmed by genetic methods, reports N1.

The species was named Aurelia pseudosolida, and was found during the mass appearance of the ribfish Mnemiopsis leidy and the jellyfish Aurelia solida.

The research was published in the journal Water, and was carried out as part of the SpaTeGen and DiVMAd projects funded by the Croatian Science Foundation, which is supported by the Institute for the Sea and the Coast.

According to the rules of the profession, the University points out, all the material on the basis of which a new species is described must be kept in natural history museums in order to make it available to other scientists for future research, so the jellyfish is preserved in the Dubrovnik Natural History Museum.

They note that this is already the second new species of jellyfish described in the last ten years in the Adriatic, after the description of the species Mawia benovici in 2014, which was named after the Croatian planktologist and ecologist Adam Benović (1943-2011).

The ecology of the newly described species, as well as its origin, are still unknown. Since new types of organisms are increasingly being recorded in the Adriatic as a result of climate change, there is a possibility that this newly discovered species of jellyfish is a newcomer to the Adriatic, according to the University of Dubrovnik.