Is jellyfish vegan?

After having kept jellyfish as pets (Atlantic bay nettles), I wouldn't really consider them to be vegetarian nor vegan. While similar to plants, seemed to have a greater sense of environmental awareness than my plants. Mine could sense light, have "off days", and interact with their environment. It's probably true that there's not much going on there due to the small amount of nerves that control everything, but even when mine would accidentally get caught on tank cleaning tools or get bumped around they'd react in a protective way and to me it's just similar enough to animalistic behavior that I'd not feel comfortable consuming them if I were vegan.
- Don’t most plants sense light and interact with their environment?
  Tardigrades have been observed reacting defensively to danger, even offensively. I know they’re not plants, but do they feel pain? What about brine shrimp?
  Jellyfish are super weird because they really blur the lines between plant/animal. It’s a really interesting question to ask honestly.
- So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
  Or is it to not eat anything that comes from the an organism from the Animalia kingdom because harming animals is immoral?
  After proofreading, these sound more aggressive/argumentative than i had intended but they get the point across.
  
  Veganism means to reduce the suffering and exploitation of animals as much as practically possible.
  There is nothing ethical about killing a living being that doesn't want to die.
  
  So is this theory of veganism to not cause pain to an animal? If so what about ethically sourced meat. Like bullet to the head/decapitation. Most of those creatures feel nothing, they just end.
  lots (propably most) animals used for farming meat are in pain during their lives.
  That's longer than the time they're dying in any case.
  
  It's the second one. In the first case, you unnecessarily kill an animal. A fair question would be if it was a natural death of the animal, like you stumbled upon a fresh carcass, is eating that still ethically or morally gray?
  But that's not the point, veganism makes sense in first world countries with factory farming. It's very clear that mass produced animal products are no go's.
- Plants feel a lot, they just can't express their feelings in a way you can perceive. For example, they feel the difference between a human touching them and wind blowing.

- Plants are also living creatures, but don't tell the Vegans.
  
  If you want to minimize plant death, going vegan is still the right move.
  Most of the crops we grow go to feeding animals that people eat.
  
  They told me Lemmy would be more leftist, why am I still seeing 0 IQ vegan jokes
  
  Plants also react to being harmed, so it's arguable they don't feel pain.
  
  People from Vega will object to that.
  
  plants are not "creatures", neither are animals.
  <br>
  both are indeed living evolutures ;)
- We may be able to tell if they are stressed, which could be related to pain, depending on your viewpoint.
  Here is a recent study of audible reactions plant can have to stress: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3
  Do plants react to stress and harmful situations like infestation? Absolutely. Do they actually feel pain as we understand it? Probably not since they lack a nervous system.
  This boils down to the question: What is pain?
- It is impossible to know anything for sure. You can just go with what is the most plausible within our current knowledge. Jellyfish posses a very simple nervous system, even less complex than that of insects. Personally I don't think it's possible for them to suffer but since there is no reason to be cruel to them why should I endorse it?

No Brain? For Jellyfish, No Problem
“I think sometimes people use its lack of a brain to treat a jellyfish in ways we wouldn’t treat another animal,” Helm says. “There are robots in South Korea that drag around the bay and suck in jellyfish and shred them alive. I’m a biologist and sometimes sacrifice animals, but I try to be humane about it. We don’t know what they are feeling, but they certainly have aversion to things that cause them harm; try to snip a tentacle and they will swim away very vigorously. Sure, they don’t have brains, but I don’t think that is an excuse to put them through a blender.”
- If you care about brainless animals, you might as well care about plants.
  
  Are we not supposed to care about plants?
  
  Jellyfish do have neurons. Fewer than an insect. Much fewer than ChatGPT. But still something. A better example is sea sponges, which don't have any neurons at all.
- Ok, but the question was whether or not they feel pain. We can definitively say they display escape behaviors when presented with an aversive stimulus, so I'd say it's likely they do feel some sort of pain, even if their perception of it is nothing like that displayed by animals with central nervous systems.
  The morality of shredding them alive by the thousands is a different conversation, but I would say yes, nature is cruel, and yes, it's possible for humans to mimic nature and kill animals in similar ways, but humans also have a knack for taking things too far, eg chickens bred to be so big they can't even walk or jellyfish-murdering robots
  
  No, just no
  
  But everyone and everything rather avoid pain, wouldn't they? And if I would like to treat those the way I would like to be treated, then why not try to help mitigate that pain where possible?

Jellyfish eat animals and animal byproducts, so no, they are not vegan.
Jokes aside, often vegans follow dietary restrictions for reasons other than an ethical or moral belief against causing pain. Many vegans don't even eat honey, so I imagine jellyfish is pretty safely in non-vegan territory.
- Are carnivores plants vegan? Genuinely curious, never looked into it.
  
  Many fertilizers are made from animal products. Are veggies grown with those fertilizers vegan?
  
  I have heard there are vegans who won't eat figs since there's a decent chance of a dead wasp in a fig due to how fig wasps procreate.
  
  If no, what about coprophagic mushrooms (I'm not aware of any fungi that are both edible and coprophagic and also produce fruiting bodies aka mushrooms big enough to possibly harvest)?
  
  Plants aren't sentient, so yes.
- Here's a good video on why vegans don't eat honey. Beekeeping is really just another form of factory farming.
  
  Can't agree fully.
  My mother has a hive in the garden. The bees pollinate our garden, live lives as nice as bee's lives can be and, at the end of the year, we take some of their honey and replace it with sugar, which the bees don't care about.
  It's a win-win, nobody is hurt, nobody is taken advatage of.

They are animals, so no.

It depends on the definition of Veganism.
There’s is a popular school of thought that the diet‘s sole purpose to reduce suffering. If a living thing has no central nervous system (or brain), it has no thoughts and cannot experience pain or harm. It’s not much different than a fruit or vegetable. I know vegans that make exceptions for oysters - for example.
Others schools of thought are about avoiding animal products altogether, it doesn’t matter if it suffers or not - there’s no way to know. Therefore, it’s immoral to eat them if you can knowingly choose an alternative.
- Veganism is not only a diet. It's an ethical stance and lifestyle.
  Edit: clarifications
- Others schools of thought are about avoiding animal products altogether, it doesn’t matter if it suffers or not - there’s no way to know. Therefore, it’s immoral to eat them if you can knowingly choose an alternative.
  But why animals in particular? Is there any more reason to think a sea sponge would be sentient than a tree?
- There’s is a popular school of thought that the diet‘s sole purpose to reduce suffering. If a living thing has no central nervous system (or brain), it has no thoughts and cannot experience pain or harm.
  What about instant death? Like a farmer putting down a well-treated cow with a bullet to the head. In this scenario, the cow never suffered. In all likelihood it probably never even had much mental distress, let alone fear of death. Would that meat be ethical/vegan friendly?
  
  Suffering is a broad definition. One would argue that prematurely ending sentient life without their consent would fit that definition.
  Often, it’s not suffering on an individual level - but the suffering of a species. Cows live in bondage and we benefit from their labor and chose to end their lives for our benefit.
  Sometimes Vegans extend this philosophy to pets and service animals - even if they’re treated exceptionally well.
  The point is that Veganism is less monolithic than folks tend to believe. A person’s diet can be deeply personal and it’s up to them to draw lines.
  I’m a meat eater. I don’t have an issue eating cows. I don’t have an issue eating rabbits, which I know people also keep as pets. I don’t have an issue eating lobster - whereas they’re boiled alive. But I know I couldn’t eat a cat or dog. Realistically, I have trouble with veal. So ya know, where I draw the line might not be the same for other people. My diet is informed by my culture, health, experiences and personal feelings - as is everyone’s.
  
  Replace cow with human and see if it passes the test.
  Is it ethical to give a human a scarf? Yes. Well it's also ethical to give a cow a scarf.
  Is it ethical to shoot a human in the head? No? Well it's also unethical to shoot a cow in the head.
  
  At the end of the day, there's probably nearly as many slightly different philosophies as there are individual vegans in the world.
  I've definitely seen vegetarians/vegans who don't really have an issue with ethically sourced meat if the animal was treated well and lived an otherwise good life, but actually ensuring that the animals receive that level of care is nearly impossible unless you raise them yourself and that's an undertaking that many people are not up to for many different reasons. I've also met some who think that keeping an animal in captivity for any reason at all is unnecessary suffering, and to that end I've also seen some who don't have an issue with hunting provided that it's done in accordance with good conservation guidelines and the hunter makes a genuine effort to make sure they get a quick, clean kill because the animal was able to live a wild and free life up to the end.
  I'm not saying those are at all mainstream vegan philosophies, they're definitely in the minority, they're just ideas that I've seen a small handful of people who identify themselves as vegans or vegetarians express at different times.
  Basically every vegan has to draw the line somewhere, the modern world was built in party by using animals and short of wandering off to start a new life naked into the woods foraging for plants, it's nearly impossible to totally decouple yourself from that, and where to draw that line can sometimes be a little murky.

I believe that it is not, since scientifically it is an animal. However, some vegetarians (not vegans) will eat fish or certain animal products.
- I thought that people who would eat fish but not other animals were pescatarians.
  
  Yes, but fewer people know that word, so it's less useful. And if you want to have a word to describe every specific version of "meat is bad" diets, you'd need as many words as there are people who avoid meat.

They're animals, so no.

Nope. Animal product. Would be ok for pescatarians, however.
- The problem is if you do this, you have to come up with a word for people who don't eat fish, but do eat insects and crustaceans, and people who don't eat them, but do eat jellyfish, and people who don't eat them, but eat (or more realistically, use the corpses of) sea sponges. And then there's people who never eat it, people who eat it but only if otherwise it would get thrown away, people who eat it but only if they're sure the animal was raised ethically, people who will never eat meat but only eat animal products if it was raised ethically, etc. It's really not worth having overly specific words like that, and nobody is going to remember them.
  
  Man, you're gonna be really pissed when you open up the dictionary...

I've known people who chose not to eat mammals, birds, fish, decapods (lobsters, crabs, prawns), or cephalopod mollusks (e.g. octopus, squid); but who were okay with eating bivalve mollusks (clams, mussels, oysters) on the grounds that they did not have enough brain to experience pain.
I think those folks would be okay with eating jellyfish.
Rather than asking, "Is X vegan?" it might be more useful to ask, "What is person P trying to accomplish by 'being vegan'? Is eating X in conflict with that?"
- this 👆

A lot of Jelly fish are immortal? Just leave a few cells and wait for it to come back to life. Death-free food for the win
- I mean, milk could also easily be death-free, but it's not vegan. It's also not suffering-free. So this suggestion kind of misses the point.
  
  You think milking cows causes suffering?

They have no brain but aren't they like almost entirely nervous system? That's all you need to feel pain; the brain just makes it more complicated than "ouch, move away from that."
- If having a reaction to physical damage (like moving away) is enough to be qualified as pain, then some plants feel pain too. We studied in biology a plant that when cut/eaten by animals releases chemicals that warn plants around it and triggers them to release another chemical that interferes with animal's digestive system and make them starve (I don't remember the name of the plant unfortunately). So should we consider this as pain too ?
  there are many other examples here too:wikipedia
  man I hate philosophy
  
  If reaction to physicals damage is enough to qualify as pain, a brick wall feels pain. If you damage it, it will start having holes, and eventually fall over completely.
  I think at the very least you'd need some kind of learning. Pain is the stuff you learn to avoid and pleasure is the stuff you learn to do more. Without that, it's impossible to say whether an instinctive response to stimuli is a negative or positive feeling.
  
  Tobacco and tomato plants do something similar. They produce more nicotine to poison the insects eating them and also warn their neighbours.
  (Yes, tomatoes also produce nicotine, and it is technically possible to become slightly addicted to tomatoes if you have a very tomato-heavy diet)
  
  Yes. It's literally how pain is defined in an anatomical sense.

would u even get anything out of eating it tho?
- Lmgtfy;
  https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/can-you-eat-jellyfish#benefits
- In China, it can be served as a salad, and I believe it is quite good.
  
  Once, at the gwailo table of a wedding, I saw a picky eater mistake jelly fish for noodles, try them and like them.
  Their face when they found out was...
  More duck tongues for the rest of us.

By a strict definition, no. But most vegans don't really care about scientific classification. Personally I don't think they're sentient and think it's fine.
- I thought this post was about whether jellyfish had a vegan diet. I had no idea being vegan meant it's ok to eat non-sentient animals as well.
- Jellyfish are not sentient either. OP may be on to something here
- did you eat them?
  
  Are you outing yourself as vegan?

I don't think animals care about weird human ideologies like veganism
- Ah, the old Lemmy switch-a-roo
  
  Hold my jelly, I'm going in!

Who TF eats jellyfish?!?
- Turtles
- Many parts in Asia, including Japan (mentioning this specifically because it's probably the easiest to find if you want to try). They are pretty delicious.
  This is how they usually look btw. You can usually find them with different kinds of sauces depending on the cuisine it comes from. The texture is like a more chewy cross between scallop and octopus.
  
  Looks kinda good.

I found a couple of articles on this:
“No.”
“it’s complicated.”

No.

- There's actually a lot of interesting science around plant "mentation" for lack of a better term, stuff that's actually super scary if you stop to think about it.
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3405699/
  "Plants emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as a means to warn other plants of impending danger. Nearby plants exposed to the induced VOCs prepare their own defense weapons in response."
  https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/is-plant-communication-a-real-thing
  "Lilach Hadany, a professor at Tel Aviv University’s School of Plant Sciences and Food Security, wanted to better understand whether plants use the acoustic realm of communication, too.
  In a study published this year, her team put tomato and tobacco plants in an acoustically isolated box and then recorded any ultrasonic sounds produced between 20 and 150 kilohertz. They experimented with cutting stems or leaving them without water as if to simulate drought.
  The researchers found that the plants emitted popping and clicking sounds at around 60 decibels, approximately as loud as human chatter. These sounds were at an ultrasonic frequency that humans cannot naturally hear, however."
  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant
  "Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals. They also noted that neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate have been found in plants, though their role remains unclear."
  
  What you are describing is reaction to stimuli. You also describe gas releasing from tomatoes. Plants definitely have some form of biological intelligence but Vegans don't care about that and that's my point. Your comment doesn't address OP's question because what you are talking about has nothing to do with Veganism. This is why I got so dang frustrated. So many of these commenters were not in a position to answer OP's question because they don't know what Veganism is or what Vegans value.
  Biological intelligence is not the same as having a subjective experience. If there is no subject, there is no one to grant rights to. There is no one ever experiencing pain or pleasure etc. You could at best take an agnostic position on plant consciousness. As we understand it today, consciousness is an emerging property of life with brains/nervous systems. In any case you are probably and hopefully wholly uncaring of tomatoes being harvested, and in that respect it's hard for me to discern your point of discussion as good faith.
- Ecological Vegans: A pound of animals tends to take 10 lbs of plants to sustain. Also other animals need these resources so using the smallest lowest impact sources to supply ourselves with food makes it more "ecologically vegan"
  That said I don't think jellyfish have any kind of intelligence we can sympathize with so anti cruelty vegans as far as we know can eat jellyfish unless some scientific breakthrough is made.
  There's a great old radiolab that covers and critiques 'plant intelligence' but afaik plants are no more intelligent than your immune system - they have some kind of stimulus memory but nothing resembling human logic or sensation
- So some Asian cultures do eat jellyfish. Maybe this is a gotcha question or maybe it's just someone coming from a less eurocentric background.
- Jellyfish are consumed as food in some parts of the world. I think the question may come from the fact that there's always some articles around about how jellyfish may be the food of the future, since they can be grown at sea (reducing land use) and don't require feed beyond algae, which is great from both an environmental and resource management perspective. I'm not sure it's entirely a cynical gotcha question :)

It's really hard to know if any particular animal feels pain. There are also hundreds of kinds of jellyfish with a variety of levels of intelligence. Some vegans would tell you that just because the nature of their intelligence is alien to us doesn't mean it's less valuable. Personally I find it difficult to empathize with any creature that lacks a brain, especially plants.

Vegan is a vanity label. It doesn't matter. Are you struggling to decide if it's ethical to eat a jellyfish? Well, don't bother. There's no good reason to eat a jellyfish in the first place.

Kind of unrelated but squids are often extremely intelligent, and are definitely not vegan in my book.

I suppose jellyfish fishing is bad for the environment. I know nothing about it though.
- Not sure, I heard some species of jellyfish are super invasive
  but then by fishing you may catch other fishes I think
  we need an expert

Given a choice, if they run away from a stimulus all the time, it is very much "painful".

They are alive, so no, not vegan.
- Plants are alive.
  
  So plants are not vegan??

I’m not sure it can be answered; it depends on the person.
Some people go with the lack of a central nervous system.
So Oysters are okay by that standard
So ¯(ツ)_/¯

Vegan is a very wide array of things ranging to not eating red meat all the way down to not doing anything that could hurt a plant (only scavengering fallen fruit).
https://theminimalistvegan.com/types-of-vegans-and-vegetarians/
- This is not at all what Veganism is.
  Veganism is LITERALLY an ethical stance regarding exploiting/harming/killing non-human animals.
  Finding a random blog online that states otherwise means nothing. Anyone who ate a salad last Tuesday these days thinks they can simply decide what Veganism is.
  THIS is the actual definition of Veganism, directly from the people who coined the term:
  “Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
  
  all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals
  Plastics that encapsulate microprocessors in computers come from fossil-fuel chemicals which are extinct animals buried millions of years ago.
  So it's not vegan to use a computer check-mate vegans.
- Don't forget the ecosexuals.
  I'm not making that up, it's apparently a thing.
  
  now that i've read the wikipedia article about them, i prefer to forget the ecosexuals.
- jains are considered vegans but vegans don't have the same considerations.
  <br>
  a vegan is simply somebody who avoids consuming any animal product including leather, honey, wool &c
  
  I once read a very good argument for Vegans who want to justify eating honey. Bees can’t be caged; they are free to simply fly away. Bees can (and do) leave bad beekeepers who don’t take proper care of them, or if they aren’t satisfied with their living conditions.

They are a living creature, so no, eating them is not vegan. It's not about the capacity of the animal to feel pain, it's about the capacity of humans to harm animals that most vegans take issue with, at least most that I know. Just because something can't feel pain, does that mean we should hurt it? I'm not vegan myself, and I don't think it's inherently wrong for omnivores to eat meat, but I do think that it doesn't matter if the animal can supposedly feel pain or not. We don't need to go looking for excuses to hurt other living creatures needlessly.
- Bacterias are living creatures as well, yet I doubt most vegans have an issue with them
  edit: I don't even know why I picked bacterias as an example when I could just have chosen plants, which are by definition alive too
  Just because something can't feel pain, does that mean we should hurt it ?
  Maybe we don't have the same definition of hurting, but I can't see how "hurting" works with something that can't feel pain. Like can you hurt a chair ?
  
  I'm not sure what you expect vegans to eat then. They can only reduce the harm they cause so much. Drawing the line at creatures that move around and actively interact with their environment, including avoiding injury and reacting to negative stimulus, is easier than trying to subsist on, like, nothing. As for bacteria, we can't like, see them, or avoid them. It's literally impossible to not ingest them. Plus the only time we actually target bacteria is when it's harming us, and it's not like vegans don't believe in enacting self defense against something that attacked you first. But we can pretty easily avoid eating jellyfish. It in fact takes more effort to eat jellyfish than it does to not eat jellyfish. I mean you can try to get pedantic about it, like whether plants avoid negative stimulus or whatever, but again, vegans have to eat something, or they'd, y'know, die. Jellyfish can have an observable avoidant reaction to harm. It's a relatively simple line to draw when you have to draw one somewhere.
  And no, you can't hurt a chair, because a chair is an inanimate object. There are humans who don't have the ability to feel pain, but that doesn't mean that they can't be hurt, as in harmed. It also doesn't make them the same as a chair.
  
  Are plants creatures, tho?

I'd say when it comes to veganism it's basically up to what you personally want to eat. I personally have no moral quandary with eating animals but if you do, I wouldn't call you a hypocrite for eating jellyfish. Plants feel pain too, in a similar way, I could see it being justified. Taxonomy shouldn't decide your morality.
- Plants do not feel pain as in the way pain is understood. People who claim that plants feel pain interpret the reaction to stimuli as feelings, but that's not the same thing as having a feeling.
  Of course there could always be something that we do not know about yet, but up until now there really is no indication that suffering is something plants experience in any way. The same way you could claim fire feels pain since it also reacts to stimuli, connects with other fire, even procreates, eats and dies.

Jellyfish belong to Cnidaria, which is a phylum under kingdom Animalia
TLDR: Jellyfish are biologicly animals
- There are some animal that you can eat that are vegan.
  The fig wasp for example is a tiny wasp that climbs into fig flowers to lay their eggs in them, polinating them in the process. Once the flower turns into a fruit, the eggs hatch and climb out of it. The dead mother wasp stays behind.
  Since the wasp dying in the fig is required both for the plant and the wasp to reproduce they are considered vegan to eat.
  So the next time you eat a fig, take a closer look. Maybe you'll see the dead wasp (or maybe you've already swallowed it)
  
  Do vegans generally accept that figs are okay to eat?
  I grew up with a crazy vegan mother who dragged me to the outings of her crazy vegan club and they were all vehemently against eating figs. We don't even live in a place where figs are common import, but they were so mad about it.