Moon jellies drifting off California now carry a half-dollar-sized capsule of electronics that pings their muscles like a gentle pacemaker. The microbursts triple their normal speed while sipping only twice the energy, Caltech engineers found, according to the Los Angeles Times.

A 3D-printed “hat” streamlines the bell and holds a pressure, temperature, and salinity logger. Total cost: roughly $20—cheaper than a single minute aboard a research vessel.

A microcontroller smaller than rice drives each cyborg jellyfish.

Why Jellyfish Beat Robots at Their Own Game

Jellies already plunge from sun-lit shallows to inky trenches without harm, shrugging off pressures strong enough to crush steel, Caltech News reports. Earlier mechanical knock-offs never matched that survivability or efficiency, so researchers flipped the script: retrofit the animal instead of copying it. A rice-grain microcontroller, coin battery, and two hair-fine electrodes nestle inside the gelatinous tissue. The soft platform provides locomotion and self-repair—the animal can heal punctures within a day—while the silicon payload records data.

Jellyfish feel no pain because they lack a central nervous system.

Mapping the Pacific on a Shoestring

A swarm of these biohybrid scouts could profile oxygen, pH, and nutrient patterns along deep Pacific currents for the price of lab glassware, notes Futurism. Unlike gliders or ROVs that generate noise and shadows, jellies slip through ecosystems unnoticed, gathering climate clues near hydrothermal vents, mid-water zooplankton clouds, and carbon-hungry twilight layers. Because the animals feed themselves, missions could last weeks, turning passive drifters into living sensor buoys.

Engineering Meets Evolution

The latest forebody—shaped like an arrow tip—boosts vertical sprinting 4.5-fold inside a towering three-story water treadmill, Popular Science reports.

Next on the bench: an internal servo that shifts ballast so the jelly can bank and yaw, giving scientists horizontal control for transects along submarine canyons. Glass-sphere housings will soon replace plastic shells, extending dives toward 4,000-meter trenches where Pacific currents drive global heat budgets.

Moon jellies naturally tolerate pressures in hadal trenches.

Ethics, Ecology, and the Road Ahead

Because jellies lack a central nervous system, bioethicists view the procedure as low-impact, a point underscored by UCSC Science Notes. Still, teams retrieve every device and are prototyping biodegradable boards to avoid electronic litter.

Field trials in Kona and the Florida Keys match native jelly species with local monitoring needs, reducing ecological risk while expanding geographic reach, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The Pacific’s New Cartographers

If steering upgrades succeed, fleets of cyborg jellies could soon stitch together a three-dimensional map of temperature spikes, acidification zones, and nutrient plumes spanning the world’s largest ocean. Data beamed topside would sharpen climate models and guide conservation policy at a fraction of today’s price.

Evolution gave jellies the tools; engineers are simply adding the memory card.