Jellyfish and Polyps Academy – JPA

Climate change today constitutes an additional threat to marine biological diversity (SDG 14 and 13). Temperature increases associated with strong cumulative anthropogenic pressures in coastal zones (overfishing, aquaculture, pollution) thus favor episodes of jellyfish proliferation, the recurrence of which is considered a symptom of the degraded health of ecosystems. However, the lack of knowledge on the ecology and biology of these organisms is an obstacle to the development of resilience management strategies in threatened ecosystems.

Faced with this erosion of biodiversity, aquariums, museums and zoos welcome up to 700 million visitors each year, or nearly a tenth of the world's population. Not only do these establishments play an important role in marine research and conservation, they also help educate the public on critical environmental issues.
In aquariums, most of the organisms presented to the public are fish for which reproduction is often controlled. Paradoxically, the diversity of invertebrate organisms is much greater and the life cycles of certain organisms are still partially unknown or uncontrolled. As a result, at present, 70% of the animals presented in aquariums are still organisms taken from the environment.

The Paris Aquarium, completely rebuilt and reinaugurated in 2006, has been developing an innovative center on jellyfish since 2013. Its Médusarium© presents 54 species to the public, the largest collection in the world outside of 2 other aquariums located in Japan. Zootechnical staff were trained in various foreign laboratories, and more than 2 million euros were invested in the creation of a breeding and research laboratory. It therefore represents an ideal platform for carrying out applied research activities.The Paris Aquarium currently has the capacity to breed all species of jellyfish for which the life cycle is controlled (2%) and now faces scientific obstacles to the exhibition of new species.

Despite the resurgent scientific enthusiasm for the ecology of jellyfish, we currently do not really know how to explain and predict the proliferation of jellyfish. This is due to the transience of episodes in a natural environment, the difficulty of definitively identifying the environmental factors influencing their dynamics and the difficulty of maintaining them in breeding. However, a team of researchers from the MARBEC Mixed Research Unit in Montpellier has been working on the ecology and biology of these gelatinous organisms for around fifteen years.

This LabCom will combine the experiences and know-how of the two partners by using the culture platform of the Aquarium de Paris to carry out research and development activities.
The objectives are to be able to cultivate 15 additional species of jellyfish within the next 5 years, to be able to reduce the number of samples taken from the natural environment and to better understand, thanks to experimental approaches on cultures of these organisms, the parameters inducing their proliferations to propose management and prevention measures for these episodes.