You may not have noticed (then again, if you’re a beachgoer, maybe you have) but there are an awful lot of jellyfish in the world. Aside from invading beaches, the creatures clog seawater intake pipes at power plants and do other kinds of damage to ports and coastal industries.

Jellyfish removal is now big business, but that creates a new problem: what to do with all the jellyfish waste? Researchers in Japan have come up with a potential solution.

Akiko Masuda of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Saitama and colleagues have extracted a previously unknown glycoprotein — a repeating sequence of amino acids with sugars attached — from jellyfish. The compound is a type of mucin, a gelatinous, moisture-retaining substance secreted by animals (it’s a main component of human saliva and mucus, for instance), and it could find uses in cosmetics, as a food additive or in drug manufacturing. Since jellyfish mucin has a simpler structure than some other mucins, it may be usable as a building block for creating custom-tailored mucins with antibiotic or other specific properties.

The researchers, who reported their findings in The Journal of Natural Products, extracted the mucin from several species including the moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita, one of the most abundant in the world) and Nemopilema nomurai, one of the biggest at up to six feet in diameter and 450 pounds. They found that the mucin made up as much as 3 percent of the dry weight of jellyfish. So there is an awful lot of mucin in the world as well.

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