Book on jellyfish

The best jellyfish books (picked by 6,000+ authors)

2 authors have picked their favorite books about jellyfish and why they recommend each book.

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Spineless

By Juli Berwald,

As much memoir as natural history, Spineless is an artful example of intertwining the two. Berwald makes the evolution and environmental adaptation of jellyfish fascinating; but what struck me most was her candid, even courageous, description of her route to becoming a scientist and the way in which serious, focused exploration of the natural world can guide and stabilize one’s personal life. The book has one of the most arrestingly beautiful covers I’ve ever seen.

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In a Sunburned Country

By Bill Bryson,

I adore Australia and was looking forward to reading this highly acclaimed book. I certainly wasn’t disappointed although it might be better-titled Everything in Australia Wants to Kill You. I live in Australia. I knew about the sharks, box jellyfish, heat, and lethal currents. I knew about the spiders and snakes. But I’d never heard of the seashell that actually chases you.

I was given a second-hand edition of this travelogue. Somebody had scribbled in the margins “eek!” and “yikes” which gave me yet another dimension to my reading. This book is funny and engaging with just an edge of snarkiness and is often so accurate you won’t need to visit the place yourself.

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Down Under

By Bill Bryson,

Bryson’s various travelogues give you such colourful views of the places he visits and, if you’re journeying to Australia, Down Under is a must-read. Expertly combining sharp observations, unusual factual snippets, and incisive wit, the pictures he paints will inspire you to travel and see it for yourself... or alternatively, persuade you to avoid it at all cost. Whichever the result, you will be amply entertained. 

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Narwhal

By Ben Clanton,

A happy-go-lucky narwhal and non-nonsense jellyfish discover the depths of the ocean together. This joyful and silly graphic novel celebrates friendship, adventure, and collaboration. The simple illustrations are compelling and accessible, drawing kids into a series of books that will leave them giggling.

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The Thing About Jellyfish

By Ali Benjamin,

Narrated in the present day with journal entries and flashbacks, The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin introduces a young girl named Suzy who secludes herself after losing her best friend to a drowning accident. One of the best parts of this book is Suzy’s ability to deep dive into the wonder she has for science, particularly jellyfish, which becomes the spark for her finding her way back into the lives of the people she’s been trying to avoid. The reader experiences Suzy’s grief with her, and by the end, feels the healing and hope that comes from the support of those around us.

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Princess Jellyfish, Volume 1

By Akiko Higashimura,

This series turns the “tortured outcast” trope on its head: these nerd characters are proud to be outcasts, and the one thing they don't want to be associated with is beautiful, popular people! I love this story because I, too, once fell into the “us vs. them” mentality against people I thought were too cool for me as a youth— people who could have potentially become my best friends! This manga series beautifully celebrates how we are all different, but still might have more in common than we think.

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Death on Earth

By Jules Howard,

This may seem like an odd recommendation, but Jules’s exploration of the way death keeps the earth going is not only fascinating, but it also widens the perspective away from humans to the animal kingdom—a handy reminder that we’re as much a part of said kingdom as any others species. It’s always a useful reminder that, despite what our individualist culture and stories and tell us, death is not always an aberration, something a sneaky lawyer hid in the small print; it’s normal, necessary, and actually very helpful.

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Crochet Cute Critters

By Sarah Zimmerman,

Sarah is a master at creating adorable and very do-able crochet patterns! This book walks you through the steps of crocheting 26 adorable amigurumi animals, including a cat, a giraffe, an elephant, a hippo, a fox, a lamb, a jellyfish, and more. Whether you’re new to crochet or just looking for some cute patterns, this book has something for you.

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The Story of Life

By Catherine Barr, Steve Williams, Amy Husband (illustrator)

The Story of Life is a good introduction to the history of life on Earth for younger readers. Introducing Earth from before life existed, it traces the changes in the planet as life begins to develop, then bloom, then flourish in every possible niche. There’s a thorough treatment of dinosaurs, which will be a favourite section for many readers. The illustrations are energetic, clever, and funny, with enough detail to let kids read and re-read as they catch every little interaction on each page. A handy time-tracker on the bottom left of each double-page spread keeps you oriented in time as you turn each page. Along with a glossary at the back, this book makes a great introduction to evolution for kids in the early primary years.   

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Hot Milk

By Deborah Levy,

While Olga’s live-wire, imperfect mothering fuelled me with a sort of righteous approval — or recognition — Rose, the mother in Hot Milk, left a metallic distaste in my mouth. Rose is limp and passive. She is the apparent sufferer of a mysterious bone disease. Her 25-year-old daughter, Sofia, has been lassoed along as “an unwilling detective” of this ailment, as well as her mother’s primary caregiver.

Sofia is her mother’s laundrywoman. Her walking stick. She dares not protest even when her mother rests her head on her shoulder, which is burning from a jellyfish sting. Admittedly, it’s not the mother that tugs me into this book, but Sofia herself. As Sofia explores her own individuation, her own eros, her own obsessions, the story grows increasingly hypnotic and propulsive.

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Or, view all 10 books about jellyfish

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Jellyfish Books for Preschoolers

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Whether you’re studying the ocean or just planning a trip there, your kids will love these jellyfish books for preschoolers! Fiction and nonfiction selections!

As you begin gathering your ocean-themed books and activities for kids, be sure to explore the books featured on the list below. They’ll help you get your kids ready to learn about jellyfish. 

Below, I’ve featured just a handful of jellyfish books for preschoolers that will help your kids ages 3-6 learn more about these brainless, spineless creatures of the sea.

You should be able to find them at your local library or bookstore. If you can’t find them locally, you can click each image cover to purchase them on Amazon.

Look, a Jellyfish! – Carefully leveled text and fresh, vibrant photos engage young readers in learning about jellyfish. Age-appropriate critical thinking questions and a photo glossary help build nonfiction learning skills.

Jeremiah Jellyfish Flies High! – Join Jeremiah Jellyfish as he swims away from his shoal and finds himself taking charge of the World’s Biggest Rocket Plane Factory! 

I Am Jellyfish – Jellyfish is quietly crooning in the shallows, when knife-nosed Swordfish swooshes, races and chases her, down, down, down, deep into the dark blue sea. At that moment, stealthy Squid stretches a tentacle, tussling and tossing Swordfish in the darkness. Who will help Swordfish? He makes a last wish… Then … ON goes a light – it’s Jellyfish!

I Am Not a Fish! – Edgar is a jellyfish, but he doesn’t look, act, or feel very much like a “fish.” With a little help though from some friendly starfish, Edgar realizes that labels aren’t important, and he should celebrate what makes him unique!

June the Jellyfish – In this bubbly little ocean tale, a shy little jellyfish loves to dance, but she is too afraid to talk to any other fish in the sea! Will she ever be able to overcome her fears and make some new friends?

Spencer and Vincent – When two jellyfish brothers are separated at sea it takes all of the ocean’s creatures to help them reunite in this heartwarming tale of brotherly love.

Peanut Butter and Jellyfish – Peanut Butter and Jellyfish are best of friends and swim up, down, around, and through their ocean home. Crabby is their neighbor. He is not their best friend. But when Crabby gets in trouble, will Peanut Butter and Jellyfish come to the rescue? You bet they will!

Jellyfish (A Day in the Life: Sea Animals) – Beautiful and translucent, jellyfish can be deadly but some are perfectly harmless. Learn about the physical traits of jellyfish, how they move, where they are found, and their hunting and sleeping habits.

Jellyfish – Readers will learn just how amazing jellyfish can be. The many species of this ocean invertebrate may not look like other undersea animals, but they have some amazing adaptations and behaviors that help them survive.

Round Out Your Unit with These Activities:

This felt jellyfish puzzle is perfect for imaginative play! Great for quiet play at appointments, bedtime, road trips, restaurants, sleep overs, fine motor skill development etc.

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A book about jellyfish and forgiveness, or is tragedy suitable for children's literature

“Whenever I think about those two days - the days of my ignorance of your departure - I think of the stars. Do you know that light from the nearest star takes four years to reach us? This means that when we see a star - any star - we are actually seeing it in the past. All these flickering lights, all the stars burning in the sky, could easily burn out many years ago - and we are unaware that the sky above us has long been empty.
( Ali Benjamin "Jellyfish Report" )

412 million heartbeats. It seems like an awful lot. But this is less than my own did by the age of thirteen. It turned out that the heart of one of the heroines of the book "Jellyfish Report" by the American writer Ali Benjamin froze forever at this meaning. It turned out that this happened to a friend of a wonderful girl Susie, with whom I really want to introduce you, as they introduce you to friends with whom you are, as they say, “on the same wavelength”. And she is like this, this Susie. I really want to invite her to visit me for tea and chat about everything in the world. Although it would be extremely difficult to “chat” with this smart and reasonable girl-know-it-all at that period of her life that the book describes. After the death of her friend, she fell into silence.

Tragedy is probably not the most suitable genre for children's literature. But even this book cannot be called tragic, although such terrible things happen in it. The tragedy usually ends with the death of one of the heroes. And what if the book does not even begin with death, but ... If death occurs even before the first page is even written? The authors of tragedies usually do not write what happens after it. What happens to those who stay. How can they get out of their grief...

Susie's heart broke, it was like a stone. And her friend Franny's heart stopped beating at the age of 12 because she drowned. Although she knew how to swim! “Sometimes terrible things just happen,” the adults tried to explain to Susie ruefully, but to believe this would mean finding yourself in a world full of terrible traps that could take your loved one away from you at any moment. In a world in which logic does not work and it is impossible to predict, prevent events, or at least explain them when the “terrible” happened.

But inquisitive Susie is used to explaining everything in the world. She would make an excellent scientist. And she tries to explain this "inexplicable" death. Guilt over a quarrel that happened on the eve of this terrible tragedy pushes her to the first explanation. She feels that the "terrible" happened because of her, it was she, Susie, who seemed to have attracted trouble into her friend's life, like a curse. This explanation is impossible to reconcile. And she starts looking for something else...

And she finds it! To do this, she has to start a real study. But I already said that she could become an excellent scientist! Her research leads her to jellyfish, small poisonous creatures. But the book is still not about them, although after reading it you will probably know everything about them. There is something in common between jellyfish and ... Susie herself. For her, they are like an image of something unlike anyone else. This is where their similarity lies. Because of your dissimilarity to others, you may be disliked and feared. But "otherness" is not a crime. And this is probably the main discovery that Susie makes. She, as it were, allows herself to be “different”, forgives herself. But the main thing is that he forgives Franny's departure and, as it were, "allows" her to be different from herself too, recognizes her right to be "ordinary".

The path to this understanding was difficult. And we see it, it is laid on all the pages of the book. Perhaps at first Susie behaves selfishly, because with her silence she makes her family and friends very worried. Susie wants to be understood, but she herself does not understand others.

And at first, The Jellyfish Report reminded me of another book about a difficult teenager with the same psychological bent, the novel I Don't Believe in Monsters by Luis Sachard. Its protagonist is a troubled boy who changes thanks to a psychologist who humanly believes in him. I expected that something like this would happen to Susie after she began to visit a psychologist at the insistence of her parents. But no. In the Jellyfish Report, the psychologist is shown exclusively as a negative character: this is a soulless woman who simply works off the money paid to her. Susie rarely talks about her and sincerely sees no sense in meeting with her. At these meetings, Susie simply remains silent for all the time allotted to her, as she is silent with all the other people around her. And it's not just her reaction to grief. It seems that she no longer sees the point in communicating with others. Previously, she tried to share with everyone what worries her - from personal experiences to world problems - but she was convinced that classmates only laugh at her. And the worst thing is that some time before her death, Franny began to move away from her, whom Susie considered almost the only close person.

And yet, as I said, this book is not about loneliness and misunderstanding. It's about forgiveness. About how not to lose yourself and find others. And also about jellyfish. There will be a lot of jellyfish in the book. This book is a bit like the sea. I want to dive and dive into it, each time getting new treasures from the depths. The book is full of amazing facts and wise thoughts. During the dive, you completely forget what you left on the shore, and completely obey the flow of the story told. Of course, the jellyfish encountered here can sting you painfully. Even to the very heart. They can make you cry. But praise to the author who makes the reader feel!

“Jellyfish, if you look closely, look like a heart, and any: a blood-red Atolla with lights like a police flasher, and a multi-colored “flower hat”, and an almost transparent lunar Aurelia aurita. It doesn't matter how she looks, the main thing is the beating, this measured pulse: she contracted, relaxed. Medusa is like the heart of a disembodied ghost: you look through it and look straight into another world, where everything that you once lost is hidden ... ”(Ali Benjamin“ Jellyfish Report ”)

Dunya Karpakova, 13 years old, Moscow

Medusa generation

Medusa is a rare example of harmony of form and content. They do not just look amazing and mysterious - their existence is indeed surrounded by numerous secrets. Even the cycle of their life has not yet been thoroughly studied, since polyps, from which millions and billions of jellyfish appear, manage to hide from the eyes and devices of scientists. It is not surprising that once you become interested in the world of jellyfish, you can once and for all lose your head from them. Something like this happened to ocean scientist Julie Berwald, who became literally obsessed with these incredible creatures. That is why her book contains a huge number of personal notes and is filled with experiences and different lyrics. But there are plenty of scientific facts in it - as part of the joint project of "Gorky" and the "Enlightener" award, Ivan Kozlov chose ten of them.

Julie Berwald. Spineless. The science of jellyfish and the art of finding the inner core. Minsk: Discourse, 2021. Translation from English by Yegor Pozdnyakov. Contents

1. Jellyfish accidentally simulated a military coup in the Philippines

Jellyfish bring a lot of trouble to mankind, and the further, the more. Researchers do not have enough data to understand whether the increased activity of jellyfish over the past half century is related to global changes in the ecosystem or whether we are talking about ordinary cycles, but the fact remains: hordes of jellyfish began to appear where they were not, and spoil everything. For example, the coast of Namibia used to be considered one of the richest places in the world with fish, but in 19In 63, jellyfish appeared there and literally devastated the coastal waters. In 2009, an incredible accumulation of giant jellyfish appeared off the coast of Japan, which also negatively affected the local ecosystem and economy. But most of all, jellyfish love to paralyze the operation of power plants - in the same Japan they are called the second global threat to energy after earthquakes. They easily penetrate through any filters and clog pipes and conduits with their mass. Sometimes this caused excesses not only of a man-made, but also of a social nature:

“In the Philippines, the cooling system of the largest power plant in the country has failed due to jellyfish caught in the pipes. This led to a massive power outage, which some residents mistook for the start of a military coup."

2. Jellyfish became part of mass culture thanks to the stories of Sherlock Holmes

mysterious. Jellyfish charmed everyone:

“Even royalty found jellyfish entertaining. Prince Albert I of Monaco persuaded Charles Richet to study the poison of a Portuguese boat. Richet received the Nobel Prize in 1913 for his discovery of anaphylaxis. Emperor Hirohito of Japan was completely obsessed with jellyfish. His main hobby was finding and describing new species of them. Such enthusiasts came to the conclusion that jellyfish, these jelly-like creatures with a primitive body structure, were the missing link between the simplest single-celled organisms and the multicellular us. ”

Interest in jellyfish did not subside throughout the 20th century. Moreover, by his first decade, the mysterious image of these creatures was also reflected in popular culture. In this context, Julie Berwald recalls the famous naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who created the book "The Beauty of Forms in Nature", which has remained popular for a century - Haeckel painted jellyfish in the Art Deco style and, it seems, since then few people have depicted them in such an aesthetically attractive key. “But the most significant evidence of the popularity of jellyfish,” notes Berwald, “was the story “The Lion's Mane” from the Sherlock Holmes cycle by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which the hairy cyanide appears as a killer.”

3. Jellyfish bars could revolutionize the health food market

One of the book's most dramatic moments is Julie's detailed and emotional account of her first attempt at making a salted jellyfish that she bought spontaneously from an Austin supermarket. Generally speaking, she went into an Asian food supermarket at random, hoping to buy jellyfish chips or something like that. But instead, she was given a heavy (and rather unpleasant-looking) gray-brown block of flesh in some kind of brine. It had to be washed many times to get rid of alum, then soaked for ten hours, boiled and cut into a salad. The author observed that the jellyfish smelled and looked extremely unpresentable at most of the stages of this process, but Julie was strengthened by the knowledge that jellyfish were quite successfully eaten many centuries ago:

“Although jellyfish are not found on Western menus these days, they were once considered a delicacy, or at least something edible. In the "History of Animals" Aristotle wrote about their culinary characteristics: "Acaleph" has two types: one is smaller and more edible, the other (which are also found near Chalkis) are large and tough. In winter, their meat is dense, so they are caught and eaten, but in summer they die: they spread and, if touched, immediately disintegrate, so that they cannot be pulled out whole.

As a result, the jellyfish turned out to be not nasty, but not exactly tasty either - as such, it had almost no taste of its own. However, Julie Berwald seemed to be quite satisfied with this result, because in the end she almost turned into a propagandist of jellyfish eating and even considered the benefits of such a diet. So, if we imagine a 200-calorie jellyfish energy bar, it will have a whopping 48 grams of protein with no fat at all.

Vino Li / Unsplash

4. One of the stages of jellyfish development looks like a fluffy Tick-Tock dragee

Strictly speaking, “jellyfish” is not the name of a living creature, but only of a certain phase of life, also called “jellyfish generation”. All other stages preceding the appearance of an adult are far from being studied thoroughly. Only the general course of the process is well known. To begin with, a larva called planula grows from a fertilized egg. Berwald cites the words of one of his interlocutors, who described the planula as "fluffy "Tick-Tock"": in the role of "fluff" it has external cilia-protrusions, which are called cilia. Planula sets sail, the ultimate goal of which is to find a site to secure. Having done this, it begins to change:

“The larva elongates, takes the form of a tube and grows thin tentacles. A mouth appears in the middle of these tentacles, from which the digestive tract passes through the entire tube. Now our being should be called a polyp. And this is not at all a short-term stage of development (like childhood in a person) through which a jellyfish passes. A polyp is a fully functioning organism.”

Berwald writes that the polyp stage can significantly exceed the medusa stage in terms of life time - sometimes, depending on the species, it lasts for years and even decades.

5. No one in the world understands where polyps are hiding

In general, everything is extremely curious with polyps - we know practically nothing about them, because scientists simply cannot catch them. So far, they have been able to study and observe in the natural environment only a small number of polyps of one species or another.

“Aurelia, the most common jellyfish in the world, is rather an exception to the general rule. Evidence of the underwater parts of the berths covered with polyps appears regularly. But the polyps of the giant Nomura jellyfish found in nature can be counted on the fingers, although the coastal waters of Japan are teeming with millions of adults.0047