Ninety-five percent water, five percent collagen: the jellyfish washing ashore as a textile
Salted, cross-linked, dyed with medieval egg yolk: researchers in the Netherlands, Japan and Israel are turning jellyfish collagen into fabric that behaves like skin because – structurally – it still is
A stranded jellyfish is ninety-five percent water and five percent collagen. Nobody fishes it, nobody eats it,and along many coastlines there are more of them every year.
That last part is a consequence of what has happened to everything else in the water. Fishing and chemical runoff have reduced fish stocks and disrupted marine ecosystems; jellyfish tolerate the chemicals, while predators such as tuna and salmon face heavy fishing pressure. The imbalance has let jellyfish numbers grow, and the carcasses arrive on beaches on their own.
Collagen holds skin, cartilage and connective tissue together in every living body. That structural role is what has drawn a handful of researchers toward a different question: whether the same protein, extracted and treated, can hold together a textile. Several projects now compete on the same premise — that collagen, much of it recovered from jellyfish, could substitute for petroleum-based synthetic fabric. All of them remain at the research stage.
Where the collagen comes from: strandings, Nomura’s jellyfish and a twenty-four-hour window
Charlotte van Alem, a paper and book restorer in the Netherlands, works only with carcasses that currents deposit on beaches after natural death, collected within a twenty-four-hour window before the tissue loses integrity.
Yurii Kasao, a 2015 Royal College of Art graduate, sources his material from Nomura’s jellyfish, a species whose blooms tear fishing nets and disrupt coastal ecosystems in the Sea of Japan — a nuisance to one industry becoming feedstock for another.
The Israeli start-up Cine’al draws on the same abundance for an application outside textiles entirely.
Salting, cross-linking and a medieval dyeing method: how jellyfish becomes fabric
Van Alem’s approach traces back to her restoration work. Studying paper items and bindings that contained leather, she found collagen inside them, and began asking whether the material could serve a second application — a question driven by heritage restoration and by a wish to confront synthetic textiles. She later visited the bioscience department at Delft University of Technology to test jellyfish under laboratory conditions a restoration studio cannot provide.
Salt draws water out of a stranded jellyfish and halts decay. Workers repeat the salting three times, which also flattens the animal for transport; producers then freeze the raw material to preserve its structure. From there, a cross-linking reaction — separate polymer chains bonding to jellyfish collagen — compacts the tissue into material that resists tearing while staying flexible.
Van Alem began testing natural additives in 2016, drawing on tempera, the dyeing method behind medieval manuscript pigments made from egg yolk. She blends egg yolk with oil and works the mixture into the skin until it dissolves evenly, adding antibacterial components sourced from chitosan and glycerin to slow decomposition in the finished fabric.
Her equipment mirrors a restoration studio: a book press, tweezers, scalpel-like tools, drying racks, a freezer. Industrial machinery enters nowhere in the process at this stage.
Jellyfish Leather and Hydromash: two other routes out of the same animal
Kasao’s method, called Jellyfish Leather, presses and dries whole jellyfish into flat sheets that can be cut, sewn and reshaped like cow leather. Other researchers in the field pair collagen with alginate, a seaweed compound, in place of Van Alem’s egg yolk and oil.
Cine’al’s Hydromash pursues a separate application. Built from jellyfish tissue that is roughly ninety percent water, it functions as an alternative to the synthetic super-absorbent polymers used in diapers, feminine hygiene products and medical sponges. The company reports that it biodegrades within about thirty days.
Silk for transparency, linen for strength: adjusting a material to fit a product
Producers can adjust the finished collagen material’s transparency and flexibility to match an application. In Van Alem’s process, silk fibres — layered in using techniques from wound-healing skin replicas — preserve transparency while adding strength; linen reduces both qualities.
“The final material will have a texture not dissimilar to rubber, parchment and/or leather,” Van Alem says.
A hat that works and a shoe that doesn’t: where the prototypes stop
No industrial facility currently produces any of these fabrics under stress-testing conditions, which leaves the researchers unable to compare their energy footprint to synthetic alternatives. Most of the energy invested remains human labour rather than machine power.
Van Alem’s first product experiments produced a hat and a shoe. The hat has advanced toward a commercial version. The shoe remains stalled: existing water-resistant coatings fail against years of rain exposure, and no natural coating has matched that durability so far.
Biodegradation testing shows a related gap between raw material and finished product. Van Alem has run two experiments — one introduced a fungus to break down the tissue, the other exposed smashed jellyfish tentacles to water alone. Both relied on external agents, and neither establishes how a finished, treated fabric would behave in an unmanaged setting. She plans further testing at Wageningen University’s laboratory, arguing that a workable disposal plan matters as much as a workable production method.
Six months from beach to object: funding, timelines and the path to scale
Public interest in collagen textiles has grown faster than funding, Van Alem says. Her project has secured support from Wageningen University and reached an agreement with a French clothing brand already exploring the material — a partnership giving an independent researcher access to funding and manufacturing scale otherwise out of reach. Major brands, she notes, commit limited research funds to projects at this stage.
Producing the raw material costs little; developing it takes time. Van Alem’s full process, from collection to finished object, runs about six months, a timeline that could shorten substantially if any of these projects reach industrial production.
From the Nobel Prize to cartilage repair: what else jellyfish have produced
Jellyfish research extends well past clothing. Green fluorescent protein, first extracted from Aequorea victoria, earned three scientists the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008; bio-designers have since used organisms carrying that protein for glow-in-the-dark inks and light sources that run without electricity.
Jellyfish collagen has also found use in medicine. Drawn from a non-mammalian source, unlike the bovine or porcine collagen used in most skin grafts, it carries less risk of disease transmission, and researchers have tested it in scaffolds for wound healing and cartilage repair — the same pairing with silk fibres that Van Alem applies to fabric.
Collagen textiles remain confined to prototypes: a hat, a shoe sample, sheets of pressed leather, an absorbent pad. What connects the projects is the source — carcasses nobody fishes and nobody eats, turned into fabric, medical scaffolding and diapers by researchers working independently of one another, largely without industrial partners, toward the same premise: that collagen can replace what petroleum currently supplies.
