The Chinese Freshwater Jellyfish Unbound

Abstract

Jellyfish are commonly known as dangerous sea creatures that humans should avoid. Focusing on the newly discovered freshwater jellyfish in the late nineteenth century, this article explores a global history of Craspedacusta sowerbii, a species native to China first noted in nineteenth-century Britain but since traveling the world over. The worldwide distribution of C. sowerbii, as both polyps and medusae, made it a global subject of scientific inquiry. However, no independent study has examined the history behind the origin, circulation, and implication of the freshwater jellyfish and its relationship with marine types. The late nineteenth century was the period when our premodern knowledge of jellyfish transformed from it being purely a marine life to the modern recognition of jellyfish as both marine and freshwater organisms, triggered by the discovery and discussion of the Chinese freshwater jellyfish C. sowerbii among naturalists and philosophers. This article focuses on Arthur de Carle Sowerby’s engagement with C. sowerbii in terms of narratives of evolution, nomenclature, and bioinvasion between 1880 and 1941. I argue that jellyfish, as a lowly form of invertebrates, should be taken more seriously by historians of modern China and historians of biology who are interested in the diverse roles of animals in shaping human–animal interactions in the Anthropocene. While the scientific research of jellyfish’s global bloom abounds, the interpretation of the global rise of jellyfish could benefit from a historically and culturally bound analysis of this classical animal. This is particularly so as scientists recognized the diverse perceptions of jellyfish. The global jellyfish bloom requires historical perspectives on a topic that has hitherto received scant attention from historians of science.