Scientists were astounded at the discovery that the mysterious moon jellyfish can rearrange its bodies when a limb is lost, which helps them survive in the wild.

For some animals, the solution to a lost limb is to simply regrow it, but the moon jellyfish’s solution is to rearrange their bodies to make them symmetrical again after a loss, according to a Christian Science Monitor report.

Scientists have never seen this before in animals. Jellyfish often face injuries due to being nibbled on by sea turtles, and studies have indicated that a third of all marine invertebrates such as jellyfish are injured at any given time.

Of course, their solution is usually to regrow limbs, not rearrange their entire bodies, an amazing revelation that changes the way scientists think about these creatures.

And the discovery was basically an accident. The researcher for the study, Michael Abrams, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, was planning to study the immortal jellyfish which can revert to its immature polyp stage even after becoming an adult. But because it was taking a long time for the specimens to arrive from Japan, Abrams decided to do a little experimentation in jellyfish husbandry and ordered moon jellyfish to do so, and tested how well they could repair themselves.

The jellyfish in their juvenile stage is just a few millimeters in diameter and looks like a snowflake with eight arms. After amputating, they noticed that they were doing something very different than others: after losing a limb, the jellies started to rotate their remaining arms to regain symmetry.