Can vegetarians eat jellyfish?
(They have no brain or heart, but they do have a nervous system.) There are about a dozen species of edible jellyfish but, if vegetarians were to eat them, they would cease to be vegetarians. This is because jellyfish are marine animals. Indeed, they are predators, feeding mainly on zooplankton, crustaceans, small fishes and larvae. OK, biting into a jellyfish does not make it bleed, but this is simply because jellyfish do not need blood to carry oxygen and carbon dioxide – these gases simply diffuse through their skin. And, strictly speaking, jellies do not possess a brain or a central nervous system either, though their “nerve net” possibly serves to qualify them as sentient. Anyway, it is difficult to see how it would be ethical for vegetarians to eat creatures that feed on other animals that are naturally out of bounds to vegetarians. On the other hand, jellyfish are 95% water: eating them provided two teenage boys with the water they needed to survive six days adrift in the Atlant
