Yes, jellyfish have eyes. In fact, the complex jellyfish eye looks like a variation of the highly evolved human eye!
Some twenty-five years ago in the mid-1980s, midway through my fifty-year career in vision research, I learned that jellyfish have eyes. At the time I was chief of the Laboratory of Molecular and Developmental Biology, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
As I ploughed through a book on invertebrate vision on reading, suddenly a life-changing moment arrived: a chapter on eyes of Cnidarians, the invertebrates that include corals, sea anemones and jellyfish.
Most cnidarians are plant-like animals stuck to the ground and don’t have eyes. But jellyfish are a different story. I was amazed to learn that the cubomedusan jellyfish (known as box jellyfish due to their symmetrical shape) have sophisticated eyes. What most people consider slimy globs that sting if you touch them (the painful sting of the notorious Australian box jelly can be lethal) are actually animals that can see!
