Jellyfish don't have a brain or a heart, but they can wipe out a commercial fish farm overnight, terrify swimmers and disable power stations.
Now a Melbourne university's top marine scientist is part of a team to find a solution to swarms of jellyfish, known as blooms, which cost industry billions of dollars a year.
Alfred Deakin Professor Graeme Hays, of Deakin University, and colleagues at Swansea University in the UK have discovered some species of jellyfish have the ability to detect the direction of ocean currents and swim strongly against them.
"Is this superpower applicable to all species of jellyfish or is it just some species?" Prof Hays said.
"If they are, this will be terribly exciting and means we can solve a universal problem."
While it's not known how jellyfish figure out which way to go, Prof Hays said they could indirectly assess the direction of drift using other cues, such as the earth's magnetic field or infrasound.
"Understanding the distribution of jellyfish in the open ocean may be practically useful for predicting and avoiding troublesome jellyfish blooms and, for example, aquaculture farms can use that information to protect their fish," he said.
"We now know that jellyfish are not just bags of jelly drifting passively in the oceans.
"They are incredibly advanced in their orientation abilities."
Prof Hays is working with Griffith University researchers in Queensland to see if the findings are replicated across other species of jellyfish.
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