Chad Widmer thinks jellyfish have gotten a bad rap.

The translucent creatures get caught in fishing nets and sucked into boat engines. Many people consider them slimy or have stories of being stung by them during a vacation.

“Most people think of jellyfish as a nuisance and they’re happy when they’re not around,” said Widmer, a marine biologist who lives on Vashon. “They’re not scary at all. They’re beautiful.”

Widmer is the force behind a new exhibit at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium that not only gets visitors up-close with jellyfish of all shapes, colors and sizes, but is being called one of the most advanced displays of its kind. A world-recognized jellyfish expert, Widmer, 45, spent months building an exhibit that can keep a variety of jellyfish and that can constantly evolve to house new species. It will be up for the next three years.

“I just want people to be excited about jellyfish,” Widmer said one sunny day this month at the aquarium, just up the street from the Point Defiance ferry dock. “I want them to come and make lifetime memories.”

Inside the cavernous and dimly lit aquarium, the exhibit, called Jammin’ with Jellies, currently holds four species hand-picked by the biologist to display the stunning diversity that exists among jellyfish.

The Japanese sea nettles, for instance, have blood-orange stripes and billowing, ghost-like tentacles. Baby-blue blubber jellies look like swimming mushrooms as they use stubby tentacles to glide quickly through the water.

Next door, a tank holding crystal jellies is one of Widmer’s favorites. Visitors can press a button to send ultraviolet light onto the creatures, causing their bells to glow blue-green.

Finally, egg yolk jellies, as their name implies, have bright yellow centers. People can stand on both sides of this tank and take photos with the jellyfish.

Just before Jammin’ with Jellies opened last month, Widmer told the Tacoma News Tribune, which produced a video and story on the exhibit, just how challenging the exhibit was to create. Each of the four species requires different conditions to live.

“I think everybody’s got a superpower, and my superpower is organizing chaos,” he said.

Though zoo-goers might not know it, jellyfish are relatively new to aquariums. The blubbery creatures are highly sensitive and need their water temperature, light and food to be just right to survive. It can also be tricky to build a tank system that doesn’t suck up their delicate bodies, which are more than 95 percent water.

“You can’t put them in a traditional tank and expect them to do well,” he said.

For that reason, jellyfish have only been kept in captivity for about 25 years. When Widmer came to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1999, scientists were still experimenting with how to propagate jellyfish and had even tried putting the creatures through a blender to remove their larvae.

“When I began, there were no instructions,” he said.

The Monterey aquarium already had biologists in charge of many of its animals, but needed someone to manage the growing jellyfish collection. Widmer stepped up, partly because he was intrigued by jellyfish and partly because he saw opportunity to advance the science surrounding them.

“That’s how I got started doing jellies,” he said. “No one else wanted to do it.”

And jellyfish seemed to suit him, perhaps because the energetic scientist is a little quirky himself. Last week at Point Defiance, Widmer, clad in a blue zoo hoodie and sporting a long, blond beard, easily explained the complex techniques used to raise jellyfish but also spoke warmly about his “jellies” and was quick to crack jokes.

Widmer was behind every aspect of the Jammin’ with Jellies exhibit, from the system that pulls water from Puget Sound, filtering it before sending it back, to the music visitors hear as they look at the jellyfish. He also found some considerable cost savings by building some of the equipment himself and ordering parts from local companies.

A system that dumps krill into one of the tanks, for instance, is made using a garden hose timer and an old plastic cookie jar. Some toy gargoyles perched high above the jellyfish tanks are his own personal touch and are there to ward off “bad juju,” he said.

All joking aside, the new exhibit, Widmer said, is considered the most flexible in the world. Unlike other aquariums, conditions in the tanks at Point Defiance can be altered to house new types of jellyfish from anywhere in the world.

“I can display any type of jellyfish, from the deep sea to the tropics,” he said.

While the aquarium purchased or caught the jellyfish it currently has on display, Widmer hopes to one day propogate all the jellyfish that live in the exhibit. In a room below the main floor of the aquarium, he keeps tanks where some creatures are already growing from the embryonic stages.

“I’m a jellyfish farmer,” he said. “A jelly rancher, you could say.”

And if anyone could grow jellyfish, it’s him. In Monterey, Widmer became an expert on breeding and caring for jellyfish, publishing papers and eventually compiling what he had learned in the book “How to Keep Jellyfish in Aquariums: An Introductory Guide for Maintaining Healthy Jellies.” It was snatched up by aquariums as well as people interested in keeping jellyfish at home.

“I used language everyone could understand and threw in a few years of experience. … Aquariums around the world still use it,” he said.

After completing his PhD as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he studied jellyfish in the U.K., Widmer came to the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium. He and his wife Alicia, a marine mammal scientist he met in Monterey, moved to Vashon earlier this year, drawn by the beaches and rural living.

On the island, Alicia is now a paraeducator in the special education program at Vashon High School. A few weeks ago, the small class took a field trip to Point Defiance to see the zoo and got a special talk from Widmer about the jellyfish. The students, who studied jellyfish beforehand, took advantage of other fun elements at the exhibit, including donning colorful, life-size jellyfish costumes.

“It was a lot of fun,” Alicia said.

Widmer now walks on the south-end ferry to the zoo each day and says he and Alicia are embracing island life. He recently participated in the BioBlitz, where volunteers counted nine types of jellyfish off the shore of Maury Island.

“This is becoming a home,” he said.

At the aquarium, he already has plans to expand Jammin with Jellies, adding additional tanks. And he’ll soon begin doing research to answer the tough questions behind the fun aquarium creatures. In Puget Sound, apparent increases in jellyfish populations have made headlines and alarmed scientists. But like keeping jellyfish in aquariums, studying them in the wild, he said, is largely uncharted territory.

“That’s all sky’s the limit. Go for it,” he said.