How Does a Jellyfish Maintain Homeostasis?

Homeostasis

• All organisms thrive best under certain conditions. This includes conditions within the organism itself, or its internal environment. "Homeostasis" is the term that refers to the maintenance of this internal environment. For instance, an organism requires certain chemical and hormonal levels, a certain pH, a certain temperature and other factors to thrive. Removing cell byproducts, or wastes, is also a part of maintaining homeostasis. In humans and other mammals, this is accomplished largely through the bloodstream, which is able to carry hormones, chemicals and nutrients to cells throughout the body and remove wastes.

Jellyfish

• Jellyfish are simple gelatinous organisms. They have muscle tissues and are able to move, but lack true organs, such as a brain or heart. The organization of a jellyfish is very simple. The outer cells form a protective layer for the inner cells, which digest food material. Jellyfish are typically composed of about 96 percent water, 3 percent salts and only 1 percent organic matter. A jellyfish does not have blood or blood vessels, although it does have some simple canals that serve a similar function.

Jellyfish Homeostasis

• Single-celled organisms and simple animals like jellyfish do not have special structures to maintain homeostasis. A jellyfish's cells exchange nutrients and wastes directly with the environment, with each cell maintaining its own nutrient intake and waste removal. Each part of a jellyfish is so thin that there are only a few cells at most between any cell and the outer environment, the ocean. While a human's body requires structures to store things like water and nutrients, the ocean is filled with enough minerals and nutrients as well as water that it meets all of a jellyfish's needs at all times.

Advantages and Disadvantages

• A jellyfish is largely dependent upon its environment to maintain the correct temperature, pH, chemical and salt balance and to obtain food and remove wastes and has few systems that help it to maintain homeostasis. This has some advantages in that it does not waste energy on organ systems to maintain homeostasis. However, it is also vulnerable to any disruptive change in the environment, and has no method of protecting itself from these changes.