It belongs to one of the orders (a taxonomic category between class and family) of jellyfish that are most dangerous to humans that are known. However, until now it had gone unnoticed by science. It is a box jellyfish (name of this order due to its cubic shape) that has among its physical characteristics, in addition to venom, a total of 24 eyes (six in each of its four ropalias or main sensory structures).
The first specimens of this species, scientifically named Tripedalia maipoensis, have been found in the waters of a pond in the Mai Po Nature Reserve, in Hong Kong (China). It is the first time that jellyfish of this order have been found in Chinese waters.
The results of this research, in which it stands out that it has been possible to genetically differentiate this species from other very similar ones thanks to genetic tests, have been published in the journal Zoological Studies (with updated data in the online version on April 20).
The research team led by Qiu Jianwen, Professor in the Department of Biology at Hong Kong Bath University (HKBU), with collaborators from WWF-Hong Kong, Ocean Park Hong Kong and the University of Manchester (UK), collected samples of jellyfish from a shrimp pond in the Mai Po Nature Reserve during the summers of 2020 to 2022, and discovered the existence of a previously undescribed species.
“We named the new species Tripedalia maipoensis to reflect its type locality [Mai Po Park], where the new species was first found. Although it is currently only known from Mai Po, we believe this species is also distributed in adjacent waters. from the Pearl River estuary, as these types of ponds are connected to the estuary through a tidal channel”.
Named for its cube-shaped body, the box jellyfish (or known scientifically as class Cubozoa) belongs to the phylum Cnidaria. Although the Cubozoa class is one of the smallest groups among cnidarians, it includes some of the highly venomous marine animals that are widely known from tropical waters.
The newly discovered T. maipoensis belongs to the family Tripedaliidae and has a transparent or colorless body with an average length of 1.5 cm. It has three tentacles up to 10 cm long on each of its four ropalias (main structures).
Like other box jellyfish, the Tripedalia malipoensis has 24 eyes, distributed equally in the four ropalias. In each set of eyes, the researchers believe that two of them have lenses that allow imaging, while the other four can only perceive light.
The research team compared samples of Tripedalia maipoensis with those of other closely related species using morphological and molecular methods. They were able to discover that the new species exhibits greater diversity compared to Tripedalia cystophora, a closely related species that has been widely reported from the tropics and subtropics, including Jamaica, Hawaii, Florida, Singapore, Australia, and India.
