The aquarist responsible for culturing the Aquarium’s jellyfish collection is still working during the pandemic -- and sometimes making music with the jellies as a backdrop.

For 15 years, Tommy Knowles has spent the better part of his workdays delicately extracting the gonads of jellyfish using a pair of tweezers, then doing in vitro fertilization. For another lifecycle stage, when jellyfish reproduce asexually, Knowles cultures a colony of polyps that will pop off as sacs of genetically identical larvae; they grow into baby jellyfish – and, after six to nine months, adult jellyfish ready for life in the big exhibition tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium where they’ll be displayed.

“It’s maybe a year before they’re at peak awesomeness, and those big ones might be around for a couple of years,” Knowles says. “Jellies look a little different as they age.”

For that reason, despite his years of culturing the Aquarium’s jellyfish collection, Knowles generally avoids becoming attached. (It’s also hard to recognize which is which.) One exception was an early foray into deep-sea jellies, Lampocteis cruentiventer, or bloody belly comb jellies. Knowles named one with stumpy lobes Stumpy, and one Lampo, after its scientific name.

Before the laboratory process of culturing, the team has to collect adult jellyfish specimens, which means going out in a boat onto Monterey Bay, and finding a mature male and female (at least for some jellies – for hermaphroditic types, there’s no need). But it’s what happens inside the lab – particularly as far as non-stinging comb jellies, which proved elusive for scientists to grow – that requires the most sophistication.

A few years ago, the Aquarium jellyfish team had a breakthrough and developed a new type of tank with a high success rate of culturing comb jellies, and which became the subject of a scientific paper published April 7 in the journal PeerJ. (It was co-authored by Knowles, MacKenzie Bubel and Cypress Hansen, a former Weekly intern, with Wyatt L. Patry as lead author.) It describes their unprecedented success in keeping the Aquarium’s jellyfish tanks stocked. “The mass culture of delicate pelagic invertebrates has remained elusive,” they wrote.

The animal husbandry team continues working through the coronavirus shutdown in order to maintain the jellyfish exhibit for when the Aquarium is able to reopen. (They’ve split shifts so they work in rotation, rather than side-by-side.) “It would be impossible to just restart the collection,” Knowles says.

While the Aquarium is empty, he doesn’t think the jellies know the difference: “They have no brain. Everything is the same to jellies. They’re not lonely.”

But the jellies have an audience even during the shutdown. They are viewable on the live jelly cam, which has been viewed 711,000 times since the Aquarium closed on March 12. They also became the backdrop to a performance by Knowles, who’d long talked about a “jamming with jellies” session. He plays in Derek Bodkin’s Hovering Breadcat Folk Ensemble (which, during normal times, gigs regularly at Cooper’s Pub on Cannery Row) and got into sea shanties when he sailed tall ships across the Atlantic to Scandinavia. Itching to get back to playing guitar, while the Aquarium was devoid of visitors, he recorded a couple of sea shanties and “How Lucky” by John Prine – before Prine died of Covid-19 – in front of the jellyfish tank. “How Lucky” became a remembrance, and got picked up in a list of Prine tributes by Paste magazine, putting Knowles alongside the likes of Jeff Tweedy, Bonnie Raitt, Brandi Carlile and Dave Matthews.

Knowles sees a connection between music and jellyfish: “They’re both always changing and moving and ephemeral and not very long-lasting,” he says. “I think about jellies as our own form of art and expression.”

TO WATCH THE JELLY CAM, visit montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-cams/jelly-cam. To watch Knowles sing in front of the jellies, visit bit.ly/jammingwithjellies