All these jellies are interesting, not because of their sting and not because they could be fatal, but to me they're interesting because of this: they have a fairly well developed eye. They've got a cornea, a lens, and a retina in the back area that looks like it is capable of actually resolving images. The interesting thing about this one, is because most people take a look at vision and most people use this quote to refute evolution, saying that Darwin himself realized that something like an eye was absorb in the highest possible degree. What most people do not do is then look a little bit further than that paragraph and look at the rest of the paragraph which continues on to say, "Yet reason tells me that the difficulty of believing a perfectly complex eye could be formed by natural selection, although we can't imagine it, must have occurred."  Darwin said he just couldn't figure out the mechanism yet but he was sure it would happen and since then, in the past few years, people have proposed different mechanisms for the evolution of the eye.

Why I find it interesting is because jellies are not supposed to have a brain, they are supposed to have a diffuse nerve net. So why would a jelly need an eye? Why would it want to resolve an image? AND it not only has one eye, it has this extremely large eye here, it has a smaller eye here, and then it has two more sensory spots on this side, and then these are duplicated on the other side. So it has a total of six eyes on each one of these stalks, or six sensory structures on each one of these stalks. They have four of these stalks around the bell margin. And this is what it looks like. Here is the large eye up here, the smaller eye up here, a pit receptor right here and then a point receptor right here. I've spent most of my time focusing on this eye and it appears that it can resolve images down to 3/10th of a millimeter. So it appears to be an extremely good image forming eye. But I still haven't come up with the second part of it, is what is it doing with those images, what does it do with an image once it gets it. So, I'm just going to throw that out there as something for you to think about.

I also want to talk about arrow worms. Chaetognaths were found in great numbers on every dive at all numbers and at all levels. 300 or 400 arrow worms is the usual number. We find arrow worms all over the place. We do not study arrow worms, though. They're small, they're fast, they're hard to see. Bruce and I have been talking about this. We're going to hopefully focus in on chaetognaths, because as they are so abundant, they've got to be important, as well and we just do not understand their importance yet. So we are going to continue working on this.Note that I made an error on the slide - Beebe could almost ALWAYS see arrow worms.

I'll end with William Beebe's last notes, to talk about his abyssal lack of information -- I'm not sure if that was an intentional pun or not--but he's got "150 separate and distinct unknown fish, 235 notes on unknown animals. To list these would be most excellently reveal his abyssal ignorance of the majority of the sparks, lights, half outlines and glimpses of the heads, tails or the eyes." With that, I'll leave you with my thoughts on the mid water. Thank you.

WOW, I did 60 slides and a 30 minute video in 65 minutes. Sorry for going a little bit over Any questions from people?

Q: I was wondering if the marine snow or any of the jellies having any effect by the water temperature change caused by El Nino?

A: The question was, is El Nino actually causing or having any effect on the snow or the gelatinous zooplankton. In the past few months that we've been going out there and using the Remotely Operated Vehicle, the marine snow and the gelatinous zooplankton is all still out there. Some of the things that we have seen different, that we haven't seen before are things like the Humbolt squid, Dosidicus, which normally we never see here, which has now moved up into Monterey and if you go fishing off of San Francisco you can actually catch them. These are fairly large squids. These are probably indicative of the warmer water masses moving up the California coast. In terms of the last few days, we haven't been able to get into the water. We have tried, we've gone out on the boat, but once we get out there, the captain usually tells us we have to go home because it is too windy and too rough. It is probably just as well because visibility in the water is pretty poor right now. But in general, El Nino is such an annual, it is such a normal event, really. It is just depends on the degree of severity of El Nino. El Nino is such a normal event that chances are, we're not going to see that much difference in the fauna due to the El Nino conditions.

Q: What might cause the purple or the red coloration of some of your images - is that a natural color?.

A: Two extremely good questions, both of which I'll try to answer. One was the purple coloration of the narcomedusa Solmissus, what might have caused that purple coloration. The answer to that is relatively simple and that is I do not know. There aren't that many purple organisms down there. There are a few, there are things like Lampoctena which has a nice red color. A lot of crustaceans do have red coloration in them and it might be that in the process of a color modification. I really do not know. We haven't studied the coloration at all. We have tried to study some of the byproducts of lipids, etc. in an attempt to determine how old some of these jellies are, which is another big issue, because we do not have any idea how old any of these jellies are. But we haven't yet taken a look at what causes some of the coloration.

In terms of the first answer, how we followed some of the houses, the sinking houses of the larvaceans down to the bottom to find out what eats them. The pilots have spent hours very patiently and for the most part, without complaining, focusing in on a sinking house and following it all the way down to the bottom. We did that because we wanted to get ideas of the sinking rates. Once we got down to the bottom, I do not remember ever spending a whole lot of time watching them. But there are all things that will eat them, things like some of the sea anemones down there, some of the brittle stars will grab on to them, crabs will latch on to them. They are extremely rich, not only because of the mucous involved, but also because of all the organisms that are now living on it, all the ciliates, all the different protozoans that are living on it and most there are copepods on it, as well, along with in some cases the trapped euphausiids that are on that that have been sinking and those will get ingested, as well.

Q: You showed a slide of a worm with a bright red gut. Was that worm, was that actually a drawing or a photograph?

A: The worm with the bright red gut was actually a photograph of a worm commonly known as a tomopterid worm.

Q: What phylum?

A: It is an annelid worm. I think the genus name is Tomopteris, as far as we could tell. But it is an annelid worm, phylum Annelida.

Q: The other thing, what are larvaceans?

A: They're urochordates, would be the subphylum that they're in. So they're related to tunicates, salps, and doliolids. They're in that group.

Q: Do just certain species of jellies have vision or is that general?

A: The question was with regard to different species of jellies whether or not they have vision. The group cubomedusae are the only jellies with what look like well developed eyes. There are a lot of other jellies which have light sensors, and in fact you can generate and simulate reproduction by giving them light cues. So ctenophores and other jellies, if you turn the lights on and off in a certain sequence, you can actually stimulate reproduction. So it is clear that they have some sort of receptive ability, but the cubomedusae are the only ones with what look like well defined eyes with the cornea, the lens and the retina. It is a relatively unusual thing.

BRUCE: Thank you very much, George. In the interest of responding to the needs of the day and request of many of you to move things along, we're going to make a slight adjustment