Researching jelly-falls relies on direct observational data such as video, photography, or benthic trawls. A complication with trawling for jelly-falls is the gelatinous carcass easily falls apart and as a result, opportunistic photography, videography, and chemical analysis have been primary methods of monitoring. This means that jelly-falls are not always observed in the time period in which they exist. Because jelly-falls can be fully processed and degraded within a number of hours by scavengers and the fact that some jelly-falls will not sink below 500 m in tropical and subtropical waters, the importance and prevalence of jelly-falls may be underestimated.