Jellyfish have boring lives: eat, reproduce, repeat. For small invertebrates, life can be brutal, with predators and environmental pressures ready to kill them. But for the lighthouse jellyfish, as long as it doesn't get eaten or die of disease, it can live forever because its life can be cyclical.

Typically, the jellyfish completes fertilization outside the body to produce floating wave larvae. The larvae float for a period of time and then gradually descend, eventually landing on the substrate on the seafloor, and their form transforms into a hydrozoan body with a basal disk and tentacles. Afterwards, the hydrozoan itself undergoes a transverse split and becomes two parts, either of which can develop into a transverse split. When it grows to a certain level, it separates from the hydrozoan mother body, and after a period of planktonic life, it enters the next stage of growth, the hydrozoan

. Once a jellyfish grows to sexual maturity, it reproduces offspring, after which it eventually becomes inactive and becomes one with the sea. This means that a jellyfish exists in two typical forms during its complete life journey: the hydrozoan type, which is fixed on a substrate such as the seabed and feeds by means of its tentacles, and the jellyfish type, which floats in the water, dragging its tentacles around to hunt for food. During the life journey of a jellyfish, these two life forms appear sequentially, that is, first the hydroid, then the jellyfish, and finally death.