Key Insights
- Jellyfish are increasingly becoming a source for collagen in cosmetic and biomedical applications.
- Researchers worked with small-scale fisheries to explore the possibility of using jellyfish bycatch to create a high-quality source of the protein.
- This approach could provide an alternative to mammalian collagen, which has some limitations.
Many people rely on collagen to give their skin elasticity and prevent wrinkles. But our body’s most bountiful protein has many other medical uses, such as tissue engineering, wound healing, and drug delivery. In 2025, the global collagen market was valued at around $11.71 billion—and growing.
How to supply this booming market is equally challenging. Collagen products are often derived from livestock, such as cows or pigs, but this method has several disadvantages, such as the high land use, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with factory farming.
Now, there’s increasing interest in harvesting the substance from marine sources, including fish, sea cucumbers, sea stars, and jellyfish.
In a new study, researchers studied collagen sourced from accidentally caught jellyfish—called bycatch—that fishers would have otherwise discarded. Encouragingly, the bycatch jellyfish had collagen that was of equal quality to that of purposefully harvested animals, according to the study (Front. Mar. Sci. 2026, DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2026.1760045).
Jellyfish bycatch can be problematic for small-scale fishers, as the venomous animals clog and damage nets, reduce efficiency, and sometimes sting crew members, says study coauthor Ainara Ballesteros, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environment and Marine Science Research at the Catholic University of Valencia.
It’s not a problem that will resolve anytime soon, as jellyfish reproduce quickly in warmer seas. Due to climate change, sea surface temperature could increase by 0.8 °C by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions level off (and by 1.5 °C if they don’t), models predict.
“We wanted to explore whether something currently considered waste, or a nuisance, could instead become a valuable marine resource within a circular bioeconomy framework,” Ballesteros said in an email.
How bycatch affected collagen quality
For the study, Ballesteros and colleagues recruited 16 small-scale fishers in the Spanish Mediterranean and trained them to identify types of jellyfish. The fishers then collected data on which species were most often caught as bycatch between October 2024 and October 2025. Of 70 recorded cases of jellyfish bycatch, the most abundant species were barrel jellyfish(Rhizostoma pulmo) and mauve stingers (Pelagia noctiluca).
In a recent study, scientists harvested collagen (pictured) from jellyfish caught in the Mediterranean Sea. Credit:
COLMED
The researchers then evaluated samples in the lab to validate whether jellyfish bycatch could be a useful source of collagen.
The scientists didn’t know whether the bycatch R. pulmo collagen would maintain “the same main structural and molecular characteristics as collagen obtained from carefully hand-collected specimens,” she says. But surprisingly, the fishing nets did not damage these “extremely delicate” organisms.
The researchers extracted comparable amounts of acid-soluble collagen from the jellies: hand-netted animals produced 0.75 ± 0.13mg g–¹ dry weight compared with 0.69 ± 0.21 mg g–¹ for the bycatch specimens.
Marine collagen benefits
The study’s findings are a potential boon for the biotech industry, especially because marine collagen has several benefits over mammalian.
For instance, mammalian collagen products can create an immune reaction in our bodies that requires treatment, says Lewis Francis, a cellular molecular biologist at Swansea University in Wales, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Collagen sourced from mammals also carries “inherent risks of disease transmission, viral contaminants, and ethical or religious sourcing concerns,” says microbiologist Andrew Mearns Spragg, managing director and chief scientific officer of Welsh biotech company Jellagen, in an email.
Marine collagen, however, remains chemically stable through bioprocessing and isn’t easily biodegraded by human collagenases—the enzymes that break down collagen.
Of course, there are downsides to marine collagen, such as the potential presence of environmental toxins like arsenic or mercury. Creating suitable infrastructure to collect, store, and process large volumes of jellies is also difficult.
“Jellyfish are highly perishable and contain a very high percentage of water, which complicates transport and preservation,” says Ballesteros.
Improving the sustainability of the collagen sector
Even so, Ballesteros and colleagues aren’t the only scientists excited by the potential of jellyfish bycatch. Jellagen is exploring sustainable jellyfish collagen for medical applications such as wound healing, tissue regeneration, and treating vocal cord paralysis, while JellyCo in the US sells skincare created with jellyfish collagen peptides.
“Data presented in this article aligns well with Jellagen’s own published and peer-reviewed findings,” says Spragg, who was not involved in the study.
His team has also found “the triple helical nature of the collagen molecule is preserved” when extracted from bycatch jellyfish, he says.
The world wasted more than 23 million tons of seafood in 2021. Using bycatch and upcycling fish waste can create a truly sustainable biotech sector—if it’s rooted in robust scientific evidence, says Francis.
“It is a worthwhile source, and it is booming,” he says.
Spragg agrees: “Although still very much in the early phase, this resource offers exciting potential.”
Melissa Hobson is a freelance marine science writer based in Hastings, England.
