Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for August 07, 2022

Stop stinging yourself!

Gonna have a little trouble finding enough food.

#%$&€ yoga cramps!!

The perm will come undone now that it’s damp.

“Tangled Mess” is the tentacle name for it.

At first I thought it was a typo and missing the S. Look like swimmers to me.

He got the perm in Portugal.

Jellyfish?

Quantum entanglement.

Immune to the stings, which one is hiding Ninja Sloth?

He has naturally curly tentacles.

Oh no! I read perm as something else!!

So where is the peanut butter fish? You know, peanut butter fish and jelly fish.

Looks a bit like a Cassiopeia, or upside-down, jellyfish. These are found in mangrove forests and other shallow, warm coastal waters. They have a flattened bell so they can easily rest upside down on the shallow ocean floor. The bell continuously pulses in order to push water over the jellyfish’s tissue, providing it with oxygen and bringing in food. Their short, branched arms extend upwards and are splayed out to catch the sun’s rays, literally. The arms are typically green/grey/blue in color because photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae, live inside their tissue. It’s a symbiotic relationship: The arms provide the algae with shelter and the algae provide the jellyfish about 90% of its nutritional needs (byproducts of the photosynthesis process). The other 10% comes from zooplankton, which the jellyfish captures by stunning them with stinging cells (nematocysts), located in their oral arms. They tend to live in groups and they aren’t very dangerous for humans unless they are really disturbed. Their arms are very short, but they can work as a group to release a poisonous mucous into the water which can cause a rash.

“And now we’re going to go into some cad yellow, a little yellow ochre, and add just the least little touch of bright red . . . Ooh! that’s nice! Now take a little bit on your brush, and paint a happy little coral.”

I’ve heard of brain coral, but now we have brain jellyfish.

Remind me never to go to that wacko shell salon …

So tied up he turned purple.

There’s no such thing as a fish. — Stephen Jay Gould

Love it! Thanks for the laugh. Great addition to any day.

Does anyone recall a similar strip were one jelly whispers to another jelly ‘he converted to Judaism’; the gag being the third jelly had the little side curls that Hasidic jews wear?