National Geographic: Ocean Drifters Page #4

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It's a banquet where it's difficult to

distinguish the guests from the dinner.

The jellies also prey on one another.

The jelly plankton even have

their own great white shark.

The three-inch-long beroe

is a jelly with jawa.

Its mouth is lined with sharp,

tooth-like hooks.

The beroe latches onto its prey

and then expands to engulf it.

This ability to stretch is another

advantage of the gelatinous form.

Though scuba researchers

are limited to working

in the upper layers of the ocean,

with this submersible,

an oceanographer can study

drifting life forms down to 3,000 feet

There the world of the ocean drifters

becomes even more fantastic.

Edith Widder studies creatures living

in the deep sea currents.

Her pilot maneuvers skillfully

as he collects samples

with a battery of scientific equipment

On the way down,

they may be the first humans

to see creatures that have

drifted here for millions of years

endlessly strange and wonderful.

A siphonophore spirals out into

the watery darkness, like a galaxy.

It's maximizing the feeding area

for its fringe of stinging tentacles.

Scientists have only

recently discovered

this football-size comb jelly.

They call it Big Red.

This fish isn't sick.

In these dark unbounded depths,

with no top and no bottom,

everything simply behaves differently.

Like this squid suspended

in the stillness.

Or this squid which has developed

a transparent gelatinous body.

All the rules are different down here.

Researchers freely admit that what they

know about almost any of these animals

is less than a paragraph.

Scientists have given

this newly discovered deep-sea octopus

the nickname Oumbo.

Wider specializes in bioluminescence,

the ability of living creatures

to communicate by producing light.

To study this phenomenon,

she measures what happens

when bioluminescent animals drift

into this screen.

She must shut down her own floodlights

and use special cameras

to see how they respond.

The pitch blackness of deep water

suddenly explodes in a fiery light show

A sea cucumber

looks strange enough just before

it makes contact with the screen.

Then it turns on its own lights,

and rolls off unharmed.

Almost every animal

uses bioluminescence

in the pitch dark of the deep.

Given the abundance

of life in the oceans,

This may be the most common

form of communication on earth.

The clouds of bioluminescence

can be so bright

that they light up the instruments

inside the submersible

If attacked

some animals try to confuse their

predator with sheer incandescence,

like a flashbulb in the face.

Others illuminate the predator

in the hope that some larger predator

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