The video was recorded by Dorian Borcherds, who owns Scuba Ventures in Kavieng, New Ireland’s PNG province. Borcherds, who has been diving in the area for more than two decades, said he saw about three or four of the jellyfish and was struck by their intricate detail and the way they seemed to move purposefully through the water. “They have no brains, so I don’t know how they do this,” he said. Seeking answers, he sent the video to his wife in South Africa, who uploaded it to the Jellyfish app, a project co-founded by Dr Lisa-ann Gershwin, a jellyfish expert at the Australian Marine Stinger Advisory Services. In her words, the purpose of the app is to “answer the age-old question: what is this blob and do I have to pee? [its sting]?” “Once I saw this, I honestly could barely contain my excitement,” he said. “I almost fell off my chair.” Gershwin initially believed the video was the second sighting of a mysterious jellyfish – Chirodectes maculatus – found decades ago on the Great Barrier Reef, but now believes the “wonderful” creature is a new species. While Gershwin is confident in her findings, her work on species classification has yet to be peer-reviewed. Professor Kylie Pitt, a marine ecologist specializing in jellyfish from Griffith University, said it could be a new species, but she did not think it would be possible to know for sure based on a video alone. She said she had definitely never seen it before, but said a researcher “would have to hold the animal in hand” to be sure of its species. “It would be great to get the specimen and be able to describe its morphology, combined with genetic testing,” he said. Professor Jamie Seymour, a toxicologist from James Cook University who specializes in Australian venomous animals, says he prefers Gershwin’s earlier theory, believing the jellyfish to be Chirodectes maculatus. Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning Gershwin had helped reclassify Chirodectes maculatus – a jellyfish that has only been seen once off the coast of north Queensland, after a cyclone in 1997. He said it had remained a mystery where the invertebrate came from ever since. At first glance, he thought the new video might provide the answer. He enlisted the help of Peter Davie, a now retired – but still active – curator from the Queensland museum where the original jellyfish specimen was kept. The pair looked at the PNG footage frame by frame and noticed that the jellyfish had different markings, was much larger – about the size of a soccer ball compared to something that could fit in your hand – and various other technical differences. To their delight, they decided it was probably a new species of jellyfish, likely belonging to the same genus as the one we saw in 1997.
