How are cnidarians beneficial?

Answer 1

Cnidarians include corals. Corals provide hiding places for the majority of ocean life - reefs are the most diverse areas in the world, the ocean's rainforests, if you will. None of it would be possible without cnidarians!

Answer 2

Cnidarians are important in balancing the ecosystem, as all other organisms are that are in a food chain. If there were a decrease in numbers, other living things which rely on cnidarians would also have problems. For example, when a jellyfish kills a fish for food, it is actually helping the other populations of fish that would need to compete with the one slain for food, territory, etc. Both underpopulation and overpopulation could mean catastrophe for nature. Sea anemones are the homes of many fishes, and without these, the population of fish would dwindle, causing a decrease in the predators that eat them, and so on. With death comes life.

Answer 3

Cnidarians are an early branch of the evolutionary tree of life and are an extremely important key to understand how primitive multi-cellular animals evolved from non layered cellular animals such as sponges, into species that have two types of cell layers, an ectoderm and an endoderm. Most complex modern animals derived from a later branch of evolution that added a third cellular layer, called the mesoderm. Future research will hopefully clarify the nature of this evolutionary divergence, and fortunately sponges, cnidarians, and triploblastic animals are still available for such genetic investigation.

Cnidarians also are important to humans for their toxic venoms. Although the current understanding of the toxic effects of their venoms is extremely limited, medical research will hopefully soon give us the ability to isolate the normally debilitating effects of each component in their venoms to yield very useful tools to combat hypertension, arrhythmia, and many other human ailments that these venoms normally aggravate. When understood fully, these components can either be used directly to treat certain ailments, or lead the way towards discovering new chemicals that provide an opposing beneficial effect.

Answer 4

Jelly fish,octopus,it is also an invertabrate.