Aequorea victoria, the crystal jelly, is a hydromedusa (family Aequoreidae) distributed along the Pacific coast of North America, globally famous as the original source of green fluorescent protein (GFP). GFP was isolated in the 1960s by Osamu Shimomura, work that led to the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and revolutionized cell biology as a non-invasive fluorescent labeling tool. It is a free-swimming, planktonic predator feeding on zooplankton and small fish in near-shore waters. Genomic data have been generated for this species and are available in public databases, enabling comparative studies of cnidarian evolution and ecology.