Student researchers have cracked the code of jellyfish – interpreting the electric pulses of a jellyfish at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jellyfish confident he will stay afloat in Trump’s economy.
Through hooking up micro-electrodes to a jellyfish’s stingers, scientists have successfully broken the language barrier between human and jelly-kind. The team, led by marine biologist, Dr. Walter Finn, have been studying jellyfish behaviour for over a decade. “We’ve known jellyfish have used their specialised stinging cells for communication for years, but never have we been able to capture and understand these signals with such clarity”.
Invited for what would become jelly-kind’s first press conference in history, the press just had one question on their minds: “What do you make of Trump’s economic policy?”. The jellyfish, who were found bobbing around aimlessly in the Gulf of America, had a rather positive outlook on Washington’s economic strategy: “Trump is a businessman, he’s good for the economy”. Strikingly, all of the jellyfish interviewed repeated this same line, Trump is a businessman. Dr. Finn commented that jellyfish cluster together in groups, floating around, hearing and repeating this same line as part of their groupthink.
“Trump is a businessman, he’s good for the economy”
– Jellyfish
When asked what they thought of Trump’s tariffs on the US’s three biggest trading partners, including a 25% tariff on Canada, all jellyfish interviewed were highly confident that this would bring in business and manufacturing jobs back to the United States. “Well, they just done took our jobs, it’s ’bout time someone without a spine stood up for us little guys”, clearly identifying in shared invertebrate qualities. The Jellyfish however, as Trump has often claimed, seemed to think tariffs were paid for by foreign countries “the US has taken in hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars”.
Journalists from the Communist News Network, (CNN), tried to catch – figuratively – the jellyfish off guard: “But Mr. Jellyfish, Trump has already reversed his own 25% tariff on Canada as the US stock market crashed $5 trillion”. The jellyfish were pleased to hear this, “lower tariffs are a great idea, this is good for the economy”. When pressed further about their contradictory statements, the jellyfish circled back to their original claim “Trump is a businessman, he’s good for the economy”.
Dr. Finn reminded the press, who were disappointed that the interspecies dialogue was going around in circles, that Jellyfish evolved circular-reasoning around 500 million years ago as part of their natural back-and-forth swimming behaviour. “Jellyfish do not possess a brain nor a heart, and can only float and bob around randomly, eating and excreting”, Dr. Finn said, “they are unable think critically, haphazardly reacting to environmental stimuli”.
As the press conference drifted into an entangled mess of stingers and soundbites, Dr. Finn offered a final reflection: “In many ways, jellyfish are the perfect political commentators. No heart, no brain, and an endless ability to float with the current.”
