Muso had been sick the day his class had gone on a field trip to the aquarium, so Shanku saved up her paycheck to take her little brother on a private outing to the aquarium, and what fun was that without taking her other siblings? Muso had to pick a creature to write a report about and Shanku promised to help him find a good one. Hilael dutifully kept up with their baby sister and watched over her as she fawned over the penguins, seahorses, and turtles as long as she pleased. When they regrouped, they were outside of the jellyfish and anemone exhibit.
"Check it out! A starfish petting zoo, with anemones, too!" Muso exclaimed as he reached into the water to stroke the side of one of the deceptively squishy anemones.
Hilael picked his little sister up so she could reach in as well. "It's cold!" Banhi squealed in delight as she dipped her hand into the frigid water to pet a slimy starfish.
Shanku let her fingers trail in the water and stared at one of the few selections of coral that had been allowed into the exhibit. "...Coral ain't critters. They be oceanic succulents," she remarked.
"They are too animals!" Muso argued, and started to expound on the reasons why the primitive organism qualified as fauna instead of flora.
"Found what you're writing a paper about," Shanku said with a wry grin. "That's the best info dump I've gotten out of you yet."
"I'm still partly convinced you're just dumb. You said jellyfish were plants, too," Muso huffed.
"It grows on a stalk, mindlessly floats through the water like dandelion fluff through the air, releases little seed spores that plants themselves into the ground, grows into another stalk, and the cycle repeats. It's a plant that took advantage of being able to float around instead of always stuck to the floor!" Shanku said. "They don't even have a proper brain or nervous system like an animal."
"Neither does zooplankton and it's an animal!" Muso countered. "When you pare away all the fur, feathers, eyeballs, and other better developed features it comes down to 'photosynthesis' or 'not photosynthesis'. Jellyfish can't use sunlight like a common weed, so, it's an animal!" Shanku just grinned even more broadly and Muso groaned in frustration.
"Can we eat now?" Banhi asked hopefully as she wiped her hands on her shirt to dry them.
"Soon," Shanku promised. "We have one more exhibit to see, then we'll leave and go eat."
"Why can't we eat here?" Banhi asked and looked wistfully at a bizarre, fish themed cup another child was carrying.
"Because theme park food is always over-priced and it smells like they upcycled unfortunate displays or murdered them first in garlic to be served to visitors," Shanku said with a wrinkled nose.
"It does reek in here!" Muso agreed. He dried his hands on a towel offered to guests and began to lead the way to the last collection of tanks they had yet to visit.
Written for Artober.
The aquarium we visited in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2018 had a "petting zoo" / "touch table" for some starfish and anemone. I think coral are considered much more fragile and weren't included in the exhibit, not to mention usually sting, but JAD is a fantasy setting and I'm gonna have some coral that can be touched by little kids at aquarium petting zoos.
Jellyfish are an ocean oddity that I have struggled with for years. I would have accepted them as animals sooner if somebody had put the "big ass zooplankton" label out there sooner. Zooplankton and phytoplankton are about as basic as you can get in life forms, and size is somewhat irrelevant. The only major distinguishing difference between plants and animals is how they eat. Plants are naturally photosynthetic and don't hunt for food, and animals are not photosynthetic and do hunt for food. Carnivorous plants trap and eat animals although it would seem they often come from nutrient poor areas and have found a way to take matters into their own leaves to rely on decomposing bodies like other plants of the world, and then there are the photosynthetic animals like the sea slug, spotted salamander, and pea aphid who can utilize sunlight like a plant does. Those animals still require a fusion with algae to do so, but the end result is a photosynthetic animal.
