For a long few seconds afterward I don’t have a clue
where he might be — up, down, to my right or to my
left. Spinning, I spot his light and head for it in a sprint.
No sooner do I make it back than a jellyfish the size of
a soccer ball appears out of nowhere, moving fast and
heading in our direction. It’s a glorious thing that glows
like a jack-o-lantern in my beam.
I release the line and move fast to head it off. What
a classic animal — a worthy representative of one of
Earth’s most ancient life forms, a gelatinous symphony
of radial symmetry with a half-billion-year track
record of survival, including making it through five
mass extinctions. At first a single fish and then others
awakened by my light peer out from the frilly skirt
in bewilderment. Inside the lace, a cluster of the tiny
hitchhikers dart around in a huff. Most are juvenile jacks,
orphans from the sea taking refuge from predators. Out
of nowhere an inner voice reminds me that if I want to
continue playing the game I have to play it right. I put on
the brakes and watch the jellyfish sail out of sight.
A later jellyfish encounter takes place at midday in the
middle of Lembeh Strait in Indonesia. It begins with a
shadow passing beneath the bow as our water taxi/dive
boat nears the mooring. Through the chop we can just
make out the broken outline of a large jellyfish heading
toward the center of the strait. I begin putting on my
gear. Our Indonesian guide, Ben, shouts for Abang to cut
the boat hard right. Anna scrambles onto the top of the
flat cabin to track the animal’s course. She begins barking
advice, but it’s not what I want to hear: “Don’t get in; it’s
heading for the boat channel.”
Ben looks up and down the strait and makes an
executive decision; he shouts over the engine for Abang
to pull alongside the jellyfish and cut the engine so I can
tumble in. He lowers my camera to me and then springs
up onto the roof next to Anna to watch for approaching
boats. I surface for directions, and Anna points toward
the channel. “Five meters ahead.”
Through the splash and glare I locate the shadow still
heading for deep water. It’s a big brown beauty trailing
eight sausage-shaped feeding tentacles, each the length
of my forearm. An entourage of fish races in its wake,
their tiny tails thrashing like flags in a gale to keep pace.
Unlike the pelagic predator from Ambon with its mop of
stinging tentacles, this one is a pastoralist — a primeval
farmer packed with enough symbiotic algae to supply
its energy needs for a lifetime. It takes all the effort I can
muster to catch up with the speedster and stay with it for
a few seconds before it zooms out of sight.
From what I’ve been reading lately it’s likely we all
will be having more jellyfish encounters in the future.
Jellyfish populations are on the rise everywhere, primarily
in spontaneous blooms that produce thousands of
free-swimming medusas in a matter of days. Although
swarms have occurred for eons, the numbers are
growing at an unprecedented rate thanks to pollution
and global warming — a double-down dream come true
for jellyfishes that thrive on eutrophication, acidification,
overfishing, agricultural runoff and habitat destruction —
the sort of doomsday stuff that sickens nearly every other
form of life. If we continue spiraling toward a world that
resembles the Precambrian, these ancient time travelers
might once again inherit the seas.
AD
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From top: A juvenile fish peers out from a jellyfish skirt.
Jellyfish, Thysanostoma thysanura, and friends in Lembeh
Strait.
Opposite: A jellyfish the size of a soccer ball, Versuriga
anadyomene, from Ambon.
