An artist’s impression of the cyborg jellyfish Rebecca Konte/Caltech

Cyborg jellyfish could help in the fight against climate change by monitoring the state of the ocean. As a bonus, they also swim nearly three times faster than normal jellyfish.

John Dabiri at Stanford University and his colleagues embedded electronics into live jellyfish so that they could be remote-controlled.

Jellyfish are one of the most efficient swimmers in the world. Dabiri’s team had spent years trying to replicate their abilities in robots, but couldn’t do so. “It wasn’t very energy efficient, so we turned to utilising the jellyfish themselves,” he says. …