Directional swimming patterns in jellyfish aggregations

Abstract

Having a profound influence on marine and coastal environments worldwide, jellyfish hold significant scientific, economic, and public interest. The predictability of outbreaks and dispersion of jellyfish is limited by a fundamental gap in our understanding of their movement. Although there is evidence that jellyfish may actively affect their position, the role of active swimming in controlling jellyfish movement, and the characteristics of jellyfish swimming behavior, are not well understood. Consequently, jellyfish are often regarded as passively drifting or randomly moving organisms, both conceptually and in process studies. Here we show that the movement of jellyfish is controlled by distinctly directional swimming patterns, which are oriented against the direction of surface gravity waves. Taking a Lagrangian viewpoint from drone videos that allows the tracking of multiple adjacent jellyfish, and focusing the scyphozoan jellyfish Rhopilema nomadica as a model organism, we show that the behavior of individual jellyfish translates into a synchronized directional swimming of the aggregation as a whole. Numerical simulations show that this counter-wave swimming behavior results in biased correlated random-walk movement patterns that reduce the risk of stranding, thus providing jellyfish with an adaptive advantage critical to their survival. Our results emphasize the importance of active swimming in regulating jellyfish movement, and open the way for a more accurate representation in model studies, thus improving the predictability of jellyfish outbreaks and their dispersion, and contributing to our ability to mitigate their possible impact on coastal infrastructure and populations.