A Ukrainian couple who lost their first jellyfish museum to the war rebuilt their entire business around a single animal in a former Florida bank.
On March 27, 2026, a two-story former Wells Fargo branch three blocks from the Pompano Beach pier reopened as the Jellyfish Museum, the first venue in the United States built around a single species group rather than a general marine collection. Inside, 21 illuminated tanks hold jellyfish pulsing through neon-purple and tangerine light: reddish-brown sea nettles, fried-egg-patterned tuberculata, upside-down cassiopea resting on their bells. The animals have no brain, no heart, and no bones, and they have persisted through roughly 500 million years of ocean history without needing any of the three. Founders Alex Yanovskyi and Yana Yanovska are betting that visitors will pay to watch them do it.
Yanovska and Yanovskyi did not arrive at the single-species format as a marketing gimmick. They arrived at it twice, in two different countries, after losing the first version to a war.
The couple built their original Jellyfish Museum in downtown Kyiv, on Independence Square, in 2018. It ran for four years, drawing on Yanovskyi's background as a marine biologist and the couple's two decades in aquarium design. Then Russia invaded in February 2022. The museum's proximity to the presidential palace put it inside a military lockdown zone, and missile strikes on Kyiv's electrical grid began knocking out the pumps that kept its tanks alive. The jellyfish, dependent on constant water circulation to avoid injury or death in still water, began dying with the power. Yanovska described watching her animals go dark one tank at a time as the moment that ended her ability to stay.
She and Yanovskyi emigrated to South Florida, where they had no existing venue, no local following, and a species of animal that most operators treat as a supporting exhibit rather than a business plan. What they had was a specific, tested visitor-behavior signal from Kyiv: guests who wandered past sharks, rays, and reef displays would stop and stay at the jellyfish tank far longer than anywhere else in the building. "Seeing how deeply people connected with the jellyfish inspired us to develop a refined, education-driven concept and bring that experience to South Florida, a region so closely tied to the ocean," Yana said. The Kyiv museum still operates today, run remotely by staff who report back to Yanovska; she says soldiers on leave have been photographed standing in front of its tanks for hours.
Pompano Beach's Community Redevelopment Agency backed the rebuild with roughly $100,000 in grant funding toward interior improvements, part of a nearly $1.5 million buildout that converted the old bank into a two-year construction project. "Who else is more capable?" CRA senior project manager Kimberly Vazquez said of the founders. "They ran a jellyfish museum in the middle of a war."
The Jellyfish Museum occupies close to 10,000 square feet, with more than 6,000 square feet given over to exhibition space, across the former bank's two stories. It shows roughly 21 species at a time out of the more than 2,000 known to science, split between cold-water and tropical tanks, with lion's manes, cannonball jellyfish, and blue bladder jellyfish drawing particular attention from visitors. Every animal comes from licensed aquaculture breeders rather than wild collection, a sourcing model that matters because jellyfish are notoriously difficult to keep. Their lifespans run three months to two years depending on species, some eat only other jellyfish, and their breeding seasons rarely line up, which makes assembling and maintaining twenty-plus species simultaneously a logistical problem most aquariums choose not to solve. Because the animals cycle out naturally on that lifespan, Yanovska says the museum's full collection will turn over roughly every six to eight months, so a repeat visit six months later shows a genuinely different set of tanks.
That difficulty is precisely what makes the single-species format defensible as a business rather than just a curiosity. General aquariums keep jellyfish as one gallery among many because a dedicated jellyfish operation demands staff who specialize in an animal most aquarists never learn to breed. The Yanovskys built that specialization once in Ukraine and are now selling it as the entire product, backed by an in-house laboratory that lets visitors examine jellyfish venom and see how polluted water accelerates jellyfish reproduction.
The Yanovskys' bet did not come out of nowhere. It sits inside a decades-long pattern that the aquarium industry has quietly built its exhibit design around: jellyfish, despite having no charismatic-megafauna appeal, consistently outperform sharks, penguins, and other headline animals in visitor engagement.
The modern jellyfish exhibit traces to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's 1992 show "Planet of the Jellies," which invented much of the now-standard visual language for displaying the animals, including tank shapes built specifically for jellyfish locomotion and the pale-blue backing panel, nicknamed the Infinite Blue background, that makes every contemporary jellyfish tank look like a slice of open ocean. Two decades later, Japan's Kamo Aquarium turned a near-bankruptcy into one of the country's aquarium success stories by converting its entire building into what became the world's largest jellyfish collection, growing annual attendance from roughly 92,000 visitors in 1997 to more than 700,000 by 2014.
The pattern has accelerated in the past two years. SeaWorld San Diego opened its own dedicated jellyfish exhibit, Jewels of the Sea, in March 2025, its first standalone animal-focused attraction in over a decade, built around a 14-foot moon jelly tank and a 360-degree LED gallery billed as the largest standalone jellyfish exhibit in the country at the time. In May 2026, the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach opened Jelly Dreamscapes, a $2 million, 7,700-gallon exhibition rotating more than 40 species sourced almost entirely from its own aquaculture program rather than the wild. Both are large general aquariums treating jellyfish as their premier gallery. Pompano Beach is the first operator anywhere in the country to skip the general aquarium entirely and build the whole venue around jellyfish alone.
The commercial logic runs deeper than a good photo backdrop. A market research report on jellyfish tank installations found the format has expanded well past aquariums and into luxury hotels, spas, and retail environments, with operators like Marriott and Hilton commissioning jellyfish displays specifically to extend guest dwell time and justify premium pricing, and commercial installations now growing at roughly 9 percent annually, faster than the residential segment. The visual and biological properties that make jellyfish inexpensive to display at scale, no rocks, no plants, no shelter needs, and total indifference to blacklights or strobe lighting, are the same properties that make them cheap to stage dramatically compared to animals that need naturalistic habitats.
Pompano Beach's museum charges $19.50 to $26 per adult ticket depending on day and season, in line with boutique attraction pricing rather than major aquarium admission. Weekly programming includes Friday-night magic shows built around jellyfish tanks, and the founders have floated plans to convert the building's former drive-thru lane into an outdoor cafe. None of that changes the core proposition: a single animal, observed closely enough in an earlier venue to justify betting an entire building on it twice, in two different countries, after losing the first bet to a war that shut off the lights.
"They're beautiful, ethereal creatures that have this amazing ability to make people just stop talking and just stare for a while, which is rare these days," Yanovska said. For an animal with no brain to process the moment and no heart to register it, that reaction belongs entirely to the people paying to watch.