Make a Pet Jellyfish

Activity setup:

1. Flatten your plastic bag.
2. Cut off the handle, cut through the bottom of the bag and cut along the sides, creating two separate plastic sheets.
3. Take one of the plastic sheets and make a tiny balloon in the middle. Loosely tie it off using your thread, string or elastic band. This is the body of your jellyfish.
4. Create the jellyfish tentacles by cutting several strips from the bottom of the plastic sheet up to the jellyfish body.
5. Add some water to the body of the jellyfish through the opening that was loosely tied, but leave some air inside too so that the jellyfish can float inside the bottle.
6. Fill the bottle up with water, leaving some room at the top.
7. Gently squeeze your jellyfish into the bottle.
8. Add a few drops of blue food colouring.
9. Screw on the bottle cap and flip your bottle upside down and then right-side up—and watch your jellyfish swim!

Sea turtles and ocean plastics

You can easily tell the difference between a plastic bag and a jellyfish, but a Leatherback sea turtle can’t. Both jellyfish and plastic bags are often floating near the ocean surface, where sea turtles dine. The sea turtle will often mistake a plastic bag for a jellyfish—one of its favourite meals—and accidentally eat the plastic. Sea turtles can die from eating plastic. Plastics in the ocean cause enormous harm to marine life.

More to think about

• How is a plastic bag in water similar to a jellyfish?
• How is a real jellyfish physically different from the one you made?
• Why does your jellyfish always float up to the water surface?
• What are the consequences for ocean environments when we do not recycle properly?
• Can you think of other ways to upcycle plastics?
• How about a bottle garden?