Now that we have Jellyfish Pokemon based off of stinging jellies and ghost jellies, what are some other hypothetical concepts based of real-world jellies? Like, maybe the box jellyfish or moon jellies, or the Man-0-war.
Also, I think jellies is a funny word, don’t you?
So I have a fun story about the word “jelly,” which is that in New Zealand we don’t use “jelly” to mean a sweet, fruity spread the way it’s used in America; we only say “jam” for the whole category of things that, in US English, are divided into “jams” and “jellies.” “Jelly” for us means a fruit-flavoured gelatine dessert, which is what the US calls “jello.” I think this is all true of the UK and Australia as well as New Zealand. And we have peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches; that is A Thing. But here’s the thing; I also knew about peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches from American kids’ TV, and I didn’t know that the words meant different things depending on your dialect (it also didn’t help “jelly” is often purple in cartoons and I thought of “jam” as usually being red). I thought Americans were eating what they would call peanut-butter-and-jello sandwiches, which they made from jars of pre-made jello, and naturally this led me to believe that they were all completely insane.
Anyway yeah I think a Portuguese man o’ war Pokémon would be legit; there’s a lot you could do with that. A man o’ war isn’t technically a jellyfish at all, it’s a siphonophore, a colony of zillions of microorganisms in several different specialised types and roles. You could have a unique evolution method where multiple Pokémon of different species combine into one, and you could play on the name and mix some naval motifs into the design, maybe give it an actual sail or some cannons. There’s space for something interesting there, I think.
Pokémaniacal 
Tiburonia granrojo could probably just be copypasted right into the game as a finalized design, and I’d use six of them in my team.
And the lion’s mane jellyfish would make a good basis for a legendary Pokémon.
They could also make an alternative form of the Tentacool line that are jamfishes instead of jellyfishes, so they contain less sugar and a higher percentage of real fruits and berries. Marmaladefishes, compotefishes or coulisfishes would be too esoteric though.
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As interesting as that evolution method IS, what the heck would the Pokemon individually look like that combine into a man o’ war???
But if the ghost jelly is literally a ghost in Pokemon, then the box jelly should certainly be a box. It looks like litter. A box floating in the water but it’s really a jellyfish.
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“A man o’ war isn’t technically a jellyfish at all, it’s a siphonophore, a colony of zillions of microorganisms in several different specialised types and roles.”
Aren’t all multicellular organisms basically this though? More or less?
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Yes, basically. But each component organism (“zooid”) of a siphonophore is *itself* a multicellular organism. So it’s kind of another level of the same thing.
From this page: http://www.siphonophores.org/SiphOrganization.php
“Is a single zooid or an entire colony the siphonophore “individual”? The answer is that you have to specify what features you are interested in before you can expect a meaningful answer. Do you mean ecologically? The entire colony functions as a single organism whether it is predator or prey. So the colony is an ecological individual. The same can be said for behavior. How about evolutionarily? There are two different components to this question. If we ask how evolution acts on siphonophores now, they are individuals. All the parts of the colony are genetically identical and the colony lives or dies as a whole (except for the eudoxids described later). So siphonophores are evolutionary individuals with respect to how natural selection shapes them today. The other way to look at evolutionary individuals is by descent. We can do this by taking a look at two animals and asking which structures descend from the same feature of a common ancestor. Just as this leads us to recognize that bat wings are modified arms, it shows that siphonophore zooids are polyps and medusae, structures that can be free living animals in other species. So this argument leads to the conclusion that the zooids of siphonophores are individuals. This is not contradictory to our previous conclusions, we are just looking at a different feature of individuality.”
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“…and naturally this led me to believe that they were all completely insane.”
To be fair, this was a case of being right for the wrong reason.
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I thought the same thing about PBJ sandwiches! I was so scared to eat them, and would run the other way if they were offered.
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