Major world events through an American lens

Scientists Discover New Species, Immediately Worry About Its Instagram Potential

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute announced the discovery of a previously unknown species of deep-sea jellyfish that they're calling Chrysaora spectabilis, which is Latin for "looks incredible on camera." The creature, found at a depth of 3,200 meters in the Pacific, exhibits bioluminescent patterns that shift between violet and gold — a color scheme that one team member admitted "would absolutely crush it on nature documentaries." The paper, published in Nature, dedicates four pages to the organism's unique neural architecture and six pages to the methodology of the high-definition footage captured during the dive. Conservation groups are already leveraging the creature's aesthetic appeal to raise funding, proving once again that in the modern era, a species' survival prospects correlate directly with how good it looks in a thumbnail. The jellyfish was unavailable for comment, being a jellyfish.