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.
At this time it is impossible to know if they feel pain. They're a living creature.
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.
This is definitely the best take on veganism.
They told me Lemmy would be more leftist, why am I still seeing 0 IQ vegan jokes
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?
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?
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.”
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
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.
They're animals, so no.
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?"
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.
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."
I don't think animals care about weird human ideologies like veganism
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.
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