Sensing the planetary: Elemental jellyfish as agents of bioremediation

Abstract

Recent scientific inquiry into the lives of jellyfish has typically tied them to two, seemingly dichotomous futures. For nearly a decade, scientists have suggested that jellyfish may be taking over the oceans. Favourably responsive to the conditions of warming and increasingly hypoxic oceans, jellyfish blooms have – it seems – grown in number in recent decades, a sign of depleted oceans to come. Simultaneously, scientists have experimented with jellyfish biomaterials – including their tentacles, mucus, collagen and stem cells – to better sense and respond to environmental and biological conditions. In doing so, they have mined jellyfish for pharmaceutical, environmental and cosmetic treatments, suggesting that these jellyfish matters will play a role in the salvation of human life on Earth. Such trends in jellyfish research have re-made them as, in the words of Dmitri Papadopoulos and his co-authors, a ‘reactivated element’ of bioremediation. For them, elemental reactivations can create new situations by ‘catalyzing new modes of thought and action, waking up new insights from the slumber of the familiar and mundane’. While the uptake of jellyfish within a newly entangled sensory environment seems to promise a redistribution of agency and knowledge production across a multi-species collective, I argue here that it ultimately reifies familiar worlds. Namely, I explore how jellyfish have joined other biological agents as sensory devices and remediation technologies amid a world of petrochemicals. Through a close reading of scientific texts and interviews with scientists, I show how engagements with jellyfish reproduce the structures of petrocapitalism rather than shaking them. I ultimately consider how the concept of the ‘glitch’ in digital media might expand understandings of jellyfish beyond fossil fuels and the history of extractivism.