Science is Fun Fridays!

 

An atolla jellyfish, photographed by the SuBastian ROV, as part of the Designing The Future 2 expedition.

"The ocean's midwater is considered to be the largest habitable space for life on earth, yet it is also one of the most minimally explored marine environments."

Of course, it is difficult to study life here because the animals are fast, fragile, and often quite small.  They can't be taken out of the environment due to changes in pressure, so this team is testing new technologies to be able to study "open ocean species in situ."

I wanted to discuss something in particular that they came across, a pyrosome.

These are free-floating colonies of zooids connected by tissues that communicate and coordinate behavior, such as propelling the colony forward.  Each individual zooid pulls water through a plankton filtration system and then expels the water into the inside of the cylinder body.  This gives them propulsion mobility.

They can grow so large that a human could swim through the internal cavity!

Schmidt Ocean Institute