The key to 650 million years of evolutionary success in jellyfish is adaptability: with alternating benthic and pelagic generations, sexual and asexual reproductive modes, multitudes of body forms and a cosmopolitan distribution, jellyfish are likely to have established a plenitude of microbial associations that facilitate their staggering plasticity across the spatiotemporal changes they are exposed to through a life cycle. Here we explored bacterial affiliations associated with the scyphozoan jellyfish Chrysaora plocamia. Life stages involved in propagation through cyst formation, i.e., the mother polyps, its dormant cysts (podocysts), and polyps recently excysted (excysts) from podocysts, were investigated. Associated bacterial assemblages were assessed using MiSeq Illumina paired-end tag sequencing of the V1V2 region of the 16S rRNA gene.