The Creation of the World’s First Peanut Butter and Jellyfish

Drum and Croaker
vol. 45, January 2014, pp. 14-18

P. Zelda Montoya and Barrett L. Christie

The Dallas Zoo and Children’s Aquarium at Fair Park
650 S. RL Thornton Freeway
Dallas, Texas 75203

“Man cannot live by bread alone, he must have peanut butter”
-Bill Cosby

The science and art of aquaculture has advanced tremendously in the past few decades. Nowhere is this more evident than in the production of the most delicate of invertebrates, now commonplace at zoos and aquaria worldwide. The aquarium maintenance and culture of zooplankton, especially gelatinous zooplankton, has always been notoriously challenging (Baker, 1963), but great strides have been made in the husbandry of these delicate animals in recent decades (see Caughlan, 1984; Norton, 1993; Gershwin-Nelson and Schaadt, 1995; Raskoff et. al. 2003; Widmer, 2008; and AZA, 2013).

[...]

It has been increasingly evident in recent years that the use of many fish or shrimp-based protein sources in aquaculture is a wholly unsustainable practice (Naylor et. al., 2000, Naylor et. al., 2009) which begs the need for novel solutions.

That having been said, we would love to claim  we  conducted this trial with noble purpose, but the truth is that we just wanted to make peanut butter and jellyfish simply to see if it could be done. Whether or not it  should  be done is a question no doubt to be debated by philosophers for the ages (or at least by some aquarists over beers). We herein report on what we believe to be the first known unholy amalgamation of America’s favorite lunchtime treat and live cnidarians. The success of our trial group of  Aurelia on this experimental diet was surprising, and we hope this ridiculous experiment illustrates that unconventional approaches in husbandry are at the very least, worth trying once.

[...]

In closing, moon jellies have seen a storied past. They have delighted children at aquaria worldwide, captivated researchers with their elegant simplicity and functionality, and even traveled into space (Spangenberg, 1994); but we feel that becoming one with peanut butter helps them fulfill their ultimate destiny as a species – to become peanut butter and jellyfish!

Acknowledgements:

The authors wish to thank Julia Davis Chandler, who introduced America to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in 1901. Thanks to Mr. Peanut are of course in order, as well as our undying gratitude to that dancing banana on the internet. Yes dancing banana, it is indeed peanut butter jelly time, peanut butter jelly time. Finally, we  wish to thank Harold Burnett Reese, without whom the world would have been a darker, more inhospitable place.

http://www.columbuszoo.org/drumcroaker/pdf/2014.pdf