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The gelatinous, transparent bodies of strange jelly-like sea creatures – illuminated by the flicker of an internal light, and some with a recent meal still visible in their bellies – tumble and drift in hypnotic images that were captured under the Antarctic ice.
Edited in a “trippy video composition”, as filmmaker and scientist Emiliano Cimoli describes the film in a statement, the images feature close-up views of jellyfish, comb jellies and other transparent soft-bodied marine life in the Ross Sea, a body of deep water in the Southern Ocean at McMurdo Sound.
The exceptional details in the video allowed researchers to spot a dozen species of gelatinous animals, including two species of jellyfish and three species of comb jellies are still unknown to science, according to a new study.
Related: Image gallery: The jellyfish rule!
Cimoli, study co-author and postgraduate researcher at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, shot the footage during his visit Antarctic to conduct research in 2018 and 2019. But he wasn’t there to study jellyfish or comb jellies; instead, he was testing detection equipment to monitor algae that live under sea ice, Cimoli wrote in a video description on YouTube.
“Ice algae play a crucial role in food webs and polar marine ecosystems,” Cimoli said. “The research theme of the expeditions was to study their abundance and physiology under changing light conditions,” such as those caused by climate change, he explained on YouTube.
Inside the researchers’ field tent, there was a fairly large observation hole dug in the pack ice. Cimoli, videographer and amateur wildlife photographer, saw this as an opportunity to send cameras under the ice – some attached to the surface and others attached to diving robots – to search for elusive marine life that is often difficult to observe in its natural habitat.
It opened a window to a rarely seen ocean ecosystem, “much like a magical portal to another world,” Cimoli said in the statement.
In some images, surface ice is visible above the head. Other clips show the seabed generously sprinkled with pink starfish. But the most dramatic scenes are those in which jellies drift and ripple in inky water. In an astonishing plan, a Antarctic diplulmaris the body of the jellyfish gently pulsates and undulates; a number of small orange globes – tiny parasitic crustaceans called hyperiid amphipods – cluster around its bell. And engulfed inside the jellyfish is a recent meal: a jelly comb in the Beroe kind.
Cimoli edited the video during the COVID-19 lockdown, and he posted it on Youtube and Vimeo in March 2020. Gerlien Verhaegen, postdoctoral researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine and Terrestrial Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) in Kanagawa, Japan, and lead author of the study, acknowledged that the images were a gold mine for biologists studying jellies. The delicate structures of the spongy bodies of jellyfish and comb jellies are very difficult to preserve when the animal is removed from the water. The study authors therefore identified the species in the video by comparing them to illustrations and descriptions by naturalists, many of which date from the early 20th century, Verhaegen said in the statement.
“Our study is the first optics-based survey of gelatinous zooplankton in the Ross Sea,” the study authors reported. It is also the first study to use observations of live jellyfish in their Southern Ocean habitats to describe species and document some of the behaviors of jellyfish and comb jellies.
Scientists reported sightings of 12 species of these gelatinous animals – but not all of them matched descriptions in the scientific literature, and five individuals may be undescribed species. Images from the footage will also be used to train computer algorithms to identify jellyfish species, a feat that is only possible when training databases contain high quality photos or videos that the computer can learn from, according to the study.
And after scanning otherworldly marine environments beneath the pack ice, people might want to learn more about mysterious and remote habitats like this, Cimoli wrote on YouTube.
“When curiosity is triggered, it prompts you to get deeply involved and educate yourself about something,” Cimoli said.
The results were published on August 16 in the Biodiversity Data Log.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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