While kids won't be eating them between sliced bread any time soon, the first peanut butter-fed jellyfish have been successfully raised at the Children's Aquarium in Dallas, Texas.
Jellyfish breeder P. Zelda Montoya and aquarium supervisor Barrett L. Christie collaborated on the scheme to feed peanut butter to a new generation of around 250 moon jelly babies, NBC News reported.
"It just occurred to me that maybe this would work--of course we never expected it to," Christie told NBC News. "I thought it was an interesting kind of a joke."
The brood was raised on a diet of Walgreens peanut butter diluted by salt water, a diet that gave them a slight brown tinge.
"That's when it dawned on us that this was really working," Christie told NBC News, adding that he thought then, "I guess we're gonna have peanut butter and jellyfish."
Christie had earlier read about jellyfish being fed peanut meal as a substitute for marine protein, according to the National Geographic.
The 250 or so jellyfish have exhibited regular growth, so the next test is whether or not they reproduce.
"We're going to see if we can continue to raise them to complete their lifecycle and put down polyps," Christie said, noting that if the jellyfish produce another generation, it would be a strong sign that they are healthy.
Montoya and Christie published their observations in January's edition of the aquariast circular "Drum and Croaker, A Highly Irregular Journal for the Public Aquarist."
The scientists said in the publication that feeding aquaculture with fish- or shrimp-based protein was an unsustainable practice, GrindTV reported. Peanut butter could theoretically become a substitute.
"That having been said," the authors noted, "we would love to claim we conducted this trial with noble purpose, but the truth is that we just wanted to make peanut butter and jellyfish simply to see if it could be done."
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