Here is a good close up of Colobonema. It is a really gorgeous animal. The glowing that you see here is not the actual bioluminesence. We do not have any footage of the bioluminescence of this animal yet. One of the things we'd like to do in the future is get some good bioluminescence footage. Here are the tentacles being dropped in slow motion, it just leaves them behind. These will start glowing, the animal will turn off the light in its bell and escape and survive. If you chase it for a really long time you could make it let go of almost all of its tentacles.

This is a good example of one of the organism that we would never know much about if we had just relied on nets. As you might imagine, when an animal hits the net, it reacts and it will drop off its tentacles. Often when you see jellies collected with nets, they won't have any tentacles. This is Solmissus, a narcomedusa, it is a gorgeous animal. There is a graduate student working with narcomedusae at MBARI right now. Solmissus can get to the size of a dinner plate. We probably have at least two different species of Solmissus in Monterey Bay, one of which is a new species.

One of the other reasons I really like gelatinous zooplankton is, as Bruce alluded to earlier, is you do not have to bring them into the lab to do gut content analysis. These animals are so transparent that if this had eaten anything, here is its gut. Here is the mouth right in the center. Solmissus picks up food on the tentacles, brings it into the mouth and then anything that is eaten, you'll actually see in the middle of the stomach right there.

Solmissus occasionally gets up to the surface and if you live up in the Washington area up around Puget Sound, you'll actually see it drifting by. It really is another spectacular animal. The one new species that we have in Monterey Bay is a deep, vivid purple color instead of this translucent one right here. Here is a good close up. The graduate student who is currently working on this animal right now is also taking a look at their reproduction.

That other jelly was Aegina citra, a jelly with four tentacles. Here is Atolla, a deep sea scyphomedusa with one long trailing tentacle. The function of this one long trailing tentacle is still unknown. It always has one long trailing tentacle. Whether or not it is in the same location on every animal, we're still trying to figure that out. Again, it is one of those things that if you study these animals based on net count specimens, you wouldn't learn anything because when you pick it up from the net, it looks like a quarter or a dollar depending on the size of it and you can't even tell that it has tentacles, let alone how long they are.

Periphylla is one of the most spectacular deep sea medusa that I've seen, not only because of its beauty, its interesting shape, and its behavior but also because of its shear size. The largest one I've ever seen was caught in Antarctica. It filled a five-gallon bucket. It was huge. Here is another deep sea medusa. This one is called Poralia. We first start to see Poralia once you get to about 2,000 meters so it doesn't show up above that. It is a deep sea medusa. I would consider Poralia the second slowest swimming medusa in the world. The slowest swimming medusa in the world is called Deepstaria, which is a jelly that I didn't get any video of to show you today.

The comb jellies which I specialize in are right here. These are the ctenophores. This is a predatory ctenophore. They have a mouth right here. The whole rest of it is gut, so it is basically a swimming mouth. It eats anything and everything, primarily gelatinous. It will focus in on other jellies, other ctenophores and engulf them. They're distinct because they have eight rows of cilia which you could see here. The light that is coming back is actually diffracted light from the light of the ROV that was shining on it, so it is actually not making its own light here. Almost all ctenophores are bioluminescent, though, and can make their own light.

I'll show you a scanning electron micrograph of the mouth of this animal, because even though it is made out of jelly, it has teeth. And its teeth are made up out of cilia. Here is a new ctenophore that Bruce and I are in the process of describing right now, this is Lampocteis. We're going to call it Lampocteis cruentiventer. Cruentiventer means bloody belly. It always has a bright red belly. The coloration of the rest of its body can range from being very clear to purple, to yellow, to orange but the belly is always bright red. Here is Bolinopsis, a common shallow-water ctenophore that also occurs in the deep water. This is the animal that Bruce talked about earlier that was incredibly fragile. This is Kiyohimea usagi. Usagi is Japanese for rabbit, so if you hear that during the Olympic coverage, you'll know that they're talking about rabbits. That's almost all the Japanese I know so I'll use it.

We call it the rabbit-ear ctenophore because it looked like it had little rabbit ears coming off of it. Kiyohimea is Japanese so we kept with that language in naming the species. We used the Japanese genus name and we made up a Japanese species name. This is the animal that we have a jar with little cilia floating on the bottom of it here at Cal Academy. It reaches upwards of 20 centimeters in length. It is a fairly abundant ctenophore during certain times of the year. It also occurs in other areas of the Pacific but it has not been found in the Atlantic yet. So it appears to be one that is a little bit more limited in distribution. Here are its tentacles right here. The rest of it is pretty much all jelly, as Bruce alluded to. It is a very difficult animal to study in the lab because we can't put it into the lab to study. But with the remotely operated vehicle, the quality of the video we get is enough to actually describe it. But Cal Academy still wanted a specimen. A jar, a jar with something in it.

This is a ctenophore called Bathocyroe. Here is another ctenophore called Thalassocalyce. This is an unusual ctenophore in that it looks like a medusa, it has an opening, it has a continuous lobe. In other words, it is just like a jelly in its structure but it is a ctenophore. In Monterey Bay we have two different species of Thalassocalyce, one of them is a new species. This again is another look at Thalassocalyce and this time I think it has something in its gut right here. We call this one the umbrella ctenophore. Bruce showed some video of this one, as well, with the little tiny balls. We nicknamed this one intacta because nobody has ever been able to collect it intact. We're all very curious about what these little round structures are because they are so striking. But we haven't been able to yet, because we can't examine it in the laboratory.

One of the ones we can collect is this one, this is Hormiphera. The species is currently undescribed right now. This is one of the more abundant cydippid ctenophores in Monterey Bay, but again, it is an example of one that we haven't had time to describe yet. Here it is eating a krill. So most of these jellies are feeding on crustaceans, on copepods, on krill. A lot of the jellies can feed on each other. You've got other organisms, other vertebrates like these salmon that feed on the jellies. For instance, in a study done off of Oregon, they found out that for the chum salmon, 90 percent of the gut contents were ctenophores. So some of these animals, and particular animals like the Mola mola are specialists on jellies. Mola mola can reach up to 1,000 kilograms but its primary diet is jellies. Unless the Monterey Bay Aquarium has it, in which case it starts to feed on squid, and then it doesn't want to eat jellies anymore. But again, this gets into some of the higher issues that Bruce was talking about in terms of hiding itself, sometimes it doesn't pay to look like a jelly because something like this will may come along and eat you.

Mola mola, as it turns out, although they're very awkward up at the surface, are probably one of the more agile fish I've seen under water. I'll try to keep up with them on scuba and I've been completely unable to. Some of the other mid water fish that we find out there like this owl fish are also likely jelly eaters. These are some of the examples of some of the vertebrate fish that actually stay in the area long enough for us to photograph, and there aren't that many of them that do that. But this fish with the large eyes is well adapted for life in the mid water, in the twilight region.

This little section here is going to show you some images of predator/prey interactions. This is Beroe and what this is going to show you is how a jelly might get rid of a predator. This Beroe right here has an amphipod sitting on it. Bruce picked up this footage earlier using the ROV Ventana and he had the foresight to not only see this and realize that something was odd about the shape of it, but also identify what was on it, which is this little tiny amphipod up here. Amphipods are known parasites of gelatinous organisms. They sit in the body, they eat the body, they hamper the swimming ability and in this case this Beroe is really trying to get rid of that amphipod. The ROV pilots were skilled enough to keep this in sight and during this sequence, you'll watch this Beroe through different contortions and get this amphipod to an area where it could be blown off by the cilia. Then the Beroe wastes no time getting out of the area. We have been trying to duplicate this in the laboratory, we've got the amphipods onto the Beroe but we always get tired of waiting for something to happen and we come back the next morning and the amphipod is off. So one of these days we will get a big pot of coffee, a warm jacket and spend all night in the coldroom.

Here is Solmissus again, with an amphipod in it, so you can see that the amphipods do have an effect. Here is a siphonophore with a different type of amphipod on it right here. This is another hyperiid amphipod, but this is Streetsia. Again, you'll see it getting blown off by the siphonophore. It will become free swimming and we will spend a little bit of time looking at it on the video. The idea of this video is to show you how interrelated everything is. Not only is the mid water full of different types of gelatinous organisms, from the marine snow to the extremely long siphonophores--and here is the scale worm eating the chaetognath or the chaetognath eating the scale worm--but everything seems to eat each other, everything seems to be related and the exact relationships of everything, I think we're a long ways from finding out. The trophic relationships are very complex and it will take us a lot more time down there to learn a little bit more about what is happening.

I heard a question during the break about whether or not we should be investing in people occupied submersibles? Nothing beats being down there in person. Using remotely operated vehicles is the next best thing but if you ask anybody, we'd still rather go down there and see it with our own two eyes, just to get an idea of the complexity. And if you look around in the water column, what you'll see here are doliolids. So you can see how thick some of these swarms can get. This is just up at the surface. We have actually got sonar and video images of doliolid swarms rising during the night time and then going back down during the daytime.

If I could have the video off and go to the slides right now. What I'd like to do is quickly go through and show you some of the animals that you didn't see on the video, some of the animals that we do get in Monterey Bay. I'll intersperse with some quotes from William Beebe’s book, Half Mile Down, which I strongly recommend reading if any of you are interested. It really is a highly entertaining yet accurate description of what lives a half a mile down. One of the things we talked about in terms of the jellies, Beebe says that medusa were among the prominent of all organisms observed. I also pulled up this quote because it was an interesting comparison to using nets.  For instance, on one instance, he "counted 24 jellyfish close to the window between 200 feet and the surface. The vertical net tows from the same depth, we've never taken more than a single specimen". So it gives you an idea of the type of bias between what is there and what you might collect reaching blindly with the net down into the water column.

In terms of where diversity is, this is some of the early data that we've come up with in terms of the number of species that were found and where we found them.  Here, for example, we've got a peak between 700 and 900 meters, 600 meters, 700 and 900, 700 and 800, 800 and 900. I'm not putting this up to say that this is where we should be spending most of our time and effort. I put this slide up to illustrate the fact that we have spent almost all our efforts thus far 1,000 meters and shallower. We do not know very much at all about diversity and abundance below 1,000. That's the next frontier that we're hoping to get to with our new remotely operated vehicle and with the submersibles like the Shinkai 6500.

Most of you are probably more familiar with jellies from surface jellies like this one which is Cyanea. This is a narcomedusa which you can also find up at the surface, Solmundella which has two tentacles, very characteristic. Aegina, as we saw in the video has four tentacles. This is Aegina citra named after it's lemon colored tint. Halicreas is another one of the deep water medusa. Most of these photographs are taken in tanks once we collected the animals and brought them back to the laboratory.

 Chromatonema rubrum is a very unusual jelly.  This is an extremely difficult one to study, not because they're rare but because they're tiny. This one is probably about a centimeter long, from the top to the bottom. Although it is appealing visually, and appealing scientifically because we do not know anything about what this animal eats, it is almost impossible to find when you're down there with the remotely operated vehicle the size of a car, looking through a huge volume of water. The only way we see it is once in awhile we will see a little glimpse of red and we will zoom in and we will spot this particular jelly.

Here is a good example of what happens if you collect an animal and bring it up to the surface. Here is an animal that actually has two rings of tentacles. But when it gets bothered, it starts to drop its tentacles. And if you collect it and bring it back up to the surface, chances are you'll lose almost all the tentacles. The only way we can really make very detailed observations on its behavior is by doing the in situ work, being down there and watching it. One of the papers that you have in your packet is on another species of Benthocodon, Benthocodon pedunculata, which we studied in the Monterey Submarine Canyon and that was actually the result of a work by a Stanford undergraduate student who is now in medical school. We tried to talk her out of it but she really wanted to go anyway. But we did get her student paper published, as a result of the work she did during one spring quarter class, and that is on Benthocodon pedunculata.

This is Crossota. Again, this is actually taken on the east coast. We haven't seen it yet in the Pacific area. If we do see it, it is a fairly obvious one. This is a fairly tall one, it gets about four to six centimeters in height. They're not huge but not small, either. Arctopodema is one that I would love to spend a lot more time studying. Arctopodema lives in the Pacific and in the Atlantic Ocean. It is an unusual one. This isn't all mouth up here. All this area you see here are juvenile Arctopodema. These are little tiny medusa that are brooding. The whole life cycle of this we do not have any idea about. We do know, because we collected specimens like this, that they obviously brood their young but we do not know much more than that.

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