What Does It Take to Make a Jellyfish? | The Institute for Creation Research

What Does It Take to Make a Jellyfish?

Many jellyfish are transparent, and they have seemingly simple movements and few visible interacting parts. They should, therefore, be easy to synthesize with man-made parts, but that's not what bioengineers discovered when they recently built a jellyfish mimic from rat heart cells attached to a silicone frame.

A team of Unites States collaborators produced a structure that, when energized by an external electrical shock, flexed and moved like a jellyfish in a water tank. Nature News posted a video showing their construct in motion.1

Just what hurdles did the research team overcome in order to achieve their modest results?

The bioengineers used "a systematic design strategy to reverse engineer a muscular pump," according to the technical report in Nature Biotechnology. They also wrote, "The constructs, termed 'medusoids,' were designed with computer simulations and experiments to match key determinants of jellyfish propulsion and feeding performance by quantitatively mimicking structural design, stroke kinematics and animal-fluid interactions."2

Jellyfish may not be so simple after all.

Even though it was highly-engineered, the man-made construct is far inferior to the more excellently designed actual jellyfish. ABC News wrote, "their artificial jellyfish, for instance, is far simpler than a real one. A real one can steer through the water; Medusoid could only go straight."3 And perhaps no human engineer will ever devise a jellyfish construct that can repair and reproduce itself.

The implication is clear. Whoever designed real jellyfish was much smarter than ordinary people.

References

  1. Yong, E. Artificial jellyfish built from rat cells. Nature News. Posted on nature.com July 22, 2012, accessed July 26, 2012.
  2. Nawroth, J. et al. A tissue-engineered jellyfish with biomimetic propulsion. Nature Biotechnology. Published online before print July 22, 2012.
  3. Potter, N. Artificial Jellyfish, 'Medusoid,' Made From Rat Heart Cells. ABC News. Posted on abcnews.go.com July 23, 2012, accessed July 26, 2012.

* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.

Article posted on August 10, 2012.

The Latest
NEWS
100% Cicada Fossil
Cicadas are an unusual-looking insect belonging to the order Hemiptera (the true bugs, including bed bugs and aphids). If you live in the eastern United...

CREATION PODCAST
Earth’s Origins: Science, Theology, and a New Geology Textbook...
Since the late eighteenth century, most scientists have argued for a uniformitarian view of Earth’s history. They claim the world...

NEWS
June 2025 ICR Wallpaper
"He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from...

CREATION.LIVE PODCAST
Getting the Gospel into People's Hands | Creation.Live Podcast:...
Can God use an atheist airline pilot to reach other nations with the truth of the Gospel? The answer, obviously, is yes.   Host...

NEWS
Chimp Genome Markedly Different from Human
An oft-repeated claim of evolutionary propaganda is that chimpanzee and human DNA are 98.5% identical. This high level of DNA similarity, which has...

NEWS
''73-Million-Year-Old'' Alaskan Salmon
Fish evolution remains an enigma. Evolutionists can only say fish first “appeared” over a half-billion years ago.1 Creationists...

NEWS
God's Memorial Day
“And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of...

NEWS
The Origin of Eukaryotes
Eukaryotes are multicellular organisms that contain diverse differentiated cell types. Within almost every cell there are subcellular compartments called...

CREATION PODCAST
Water vs. Wind: The Controversial Coconino | The Creation Podcast:...
Welcome to the sixth episode in a series called “The Failures of Old Earth Creationism.” Many Christians attempt to fit old...

NEWS
Fossil Fish Finally Filmed
The bizarre lobe-finned coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) “that flourished some 350 million years ago”1 continues to be a thorn...