Shape-Based Morphoelasticity for Jellyfish Regeneration.

Many animals exhibit remarkable regenerative abilities, yet the mechanical processes that drive large-scale tissue reshaping remain challenging to characterize. Direct measurements of stress during such remodeling are difficult, while changes in morphology are readily observed. Motivated by wound healing in Clytia jellyfish, we introduce a theoretical framework that infers mechanical stress directly from shape evolution. We model the transformation as a morphoelastic process in quasi-two-dimensional geometry and exploit conformal mappings to obtain analytical expressions for the stress distribution. This data-driven approach provides a general method to connect observed shapes with the underlying mechanics of regeneration, offering a quantitative framework to study morphogenesis.