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Absurd Creature of the Week: The Beautiful But Deadly Undersea Raver That Digests Its Victims Alive
Greetings,
Absurd Creature of the Week: The Beautiful But Deadly Undersea Raver That Digests Its Victims Alive
Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible comb jelly, which considers every day a rave. Unce unce unce. GIF: NURIE MOHAMED/WIRED. SOURCE: MONTEREY BAY AQUARIUM
Up here on terra firma, we’re treated to all kinds of wildly colorful wildlife: polychromatic parrots, iridescent green beetles, unicorns galloping on rainbows that one time I ate too many pot brownies. But in the depths of our oceans things are decidedly more drab—gaudy colors ain’t going to do you no good nohow in the darkness. You’ll find a creature here, though, that has evolved what is surely the most over-the-top Pink Floyd-esque laser show in the sea: the comb jelly.
These critters, some 150 described species and another 40 or 50 still awaiting names, locomote by beating rows of tiny hairlike structures called cilia. When white light hits them from, say, a submersible’s beam, the cilia break it into its wavelength colors, producing that hypnotic shimmering rainbow. But don’t be fooled by their beauty: Comb jellies—known scientifically as ctenophores (pronounced TEE-no-fores)—are formidable predators with ultra-fast strikes, hoovering up all manner of zooplankton like copepods and other tiny crustaceans and digesting them alive.
Strangely, though, that laser show is probably a happy accident that only really kicks off when we hit them with high-powered electric light, according to Steve Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). “In the wild it probably doesn’t happen, or hardly happens at all,” he said. “And I would think it doesn’t actually have an ecological meaning. It’s kind of a side effect of us bringing them up and shining white lights on them.” Even with comb jellies that tend to live closer to the surface, the effect seems negligible until you hit them with artificial light…..More Here
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