Cassiopea
Upside-down jellyfish
- Methods
- Deep-learning object detection, Image analysis, Time-series data
- Collaborators
- Kaden Muffett
- Status
- New project · manuscript in preparation
The system
Cassiopea, the upside-down jellyfish, rests bell-down on the seafloor in shallow tropical water. Like corals and Exaiptasia, it lives with photosynthetic algae, which makes it another window onto how symbioses respond to a changing environment.
Its life cycle has two stages: a small, stationary polyp and the free-swimming jellyfish. The switch between them, called strobilation, is when a polyp transforms and releases a juvenile jellyfish. When that happens is a key life-history event, but timing it by eye is slow and inconsistent.
The project
With Kaden Muffett, I am training deep-learning object detectors on daily photographs of Cassiopea polyps to measure the timing of strobilation automatically. The goal is a reliable, scalable measurement that can be applied across many animals and experimental conditions.
Outputs
- Talk: CassiopeaBase MATH-BIO 2026, Key Largo, FL (June 2026).
- In preparation: Williams, S., Muffett, K. M. Deep learning measures the timing of strobilation in Cassiopea from daily photographs.