Don’t you wish you had an ubercool espionage movie soundtrack to accompany you wherever you go? I know I do. Make sure to hit the HQ button if you have the bandwidth.

Actually, I quite wish they’d present more nature videos this way. Do these jellies not have the feel of sleek hyper-space cruisers in this short film? It befits the coolness I think these organisms have, rather than the hysterical watch-me-nearly-die antics and 4th-grade scripting approach (Top 10 most venomous animals!) which many popular modern animal shows lure viewers (A favorite card game of mine parodies one particularly popular version as “The Animal Bothering Show”). These images were captured by a remote rover operated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where presumably one very cool member of the staff thought to include the soundtrack. Anyone know where it’s really from?

So let’s talk about this particularly cool creature, Lampocteis cruentiventer. Their stomachs are always blood red; their bodies may come in various shades of the color. They can grow up to about 6 inches long — about the size of a hand — and they swim from about 1,000 to 3,300 feet down. That’s pretty deep, but not abyssal. Still, they probably never see much of the light of day.

Which, strangely enough, explains their brilliant red coloring. Red light is filtered most efficiently by water, and after traveling a few hundred feet down, there is very little left. Thus organisms that are red will appear gray or black in the deep, like a hole in the water. Thus, many deep sea creatures, when illuminated by explorers’ lights, appear lurid red.

Now let’s say, for the sake of argument, you live in the dark and like to eat things that glow. But dang it, you’re transparent! Now breakfast is causing you a bit of a problem that cannot be solved by Rolaids. Solution: encase your stomach in the undersea version of air raid curtains — red pigment. Hence the bloodbelly. (Although it does sound a bit like a better name for a grizzled jazz musician: “Good Evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is Blood Belly and tonight I’m going to play a little number for you I like to call . . . “)

Comb jellies are ctenophores (“ten’-o-fours”), which have eight cilia-bearing (small beating filaments) combs called ctenes with which they weakly swim. Whenever I have been lucky enough to visit an aquarium, I have spent many long minutes fogging up the glass staring at the undulating cilia of comb jellies. It’s a fascinating riot of colors and textures. The cilia make these the largest creatures to swim by such a mechanism, and give them a superficial resemblance to overgrown Paramecia. Both jellyfish and ctenophores have two cell layers separated by a gooey center, the mesogloea (mes-o-glee-a). This is a chief way they differ from us “higher” animals, who have a fancy middle layer we’ve parleyed into stomachs, livers, brains, gall bladders, spleens, appendices, giblets etc. Go us!

Comb jellies can also have two long tentacles. Instead of the famous stinging nematocysts that true jellyfish bear on their tentacles, comb jellies  have sticky cells called colloblasts that rupture to release glue that captures their prey. They then retract the tentacles to bring their food to their mouths. Unlike jellyfish, which have a single opening to serve as mouth and anus (thank GOD evolution didn’t stick that particular system in vertebrates), ctenophores have one opening at the mouth and two at the back, though all three may serve when nature calls.

Scientists, as with most groups, are fighting constantly about how cnidarians(jellyfish, corals, and friends), ctenophores, and every animal more complex (usually referred to as a group called “Bilateria”, all the mirror-image symmetry animals) are related. As it’s a fight that’s enormously complicated and still ongoing, I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say, they ARE related. Here is one possible family tree.

One final note — ctenophores are also clearly an inspiration for the creatures in the 1989 movie “The Abyss“, a sci-fi classic you should see if you have not (though many in the know urge finding the director’s cut). A personal favorite. See here and here for some striking examples.

Discovered via Deep Sea News.

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My old college friend and NIH postdoc Laurie Waters with an actual GIANT SQUID. It wasn't so long ago scientists were still debating whether these actually existed.

Washington, DC, did not disappoint. The highlight was the Sant Ocean Hall in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, newly opened a year ago after a major remodeling of the cross hall it sits in. The hall soars and boasts a life-size whale model; the exhibits beckon with enticing photographs, movies, and a spherical screen on which swirling ocean currents flow across a spinning globe to eerily convincing effect. Welcome to the future.

A brief tour of my favorites . . .

Above is the super-awesome giant squid, appropriately locked inside a riveted metal case lest it suddenly come back to life, break the glass, and start pillaging and marauding the museum. It was the first time I had seen a specimen in real life, and I must confess that although it was suitably enormous, it seemed smaller (but not shorter) than I expected. That is, of course, easy for me to say as I stand there staring at it from the right side of a riveted glass case, and would, perhaps, be less so were I to encounter one in its natural milieu. As I often say when explaining why I won’t hike solo in the backcountry, I’m really quite snackable. The specimen in the case above is the female; the male was smaller and displayed in an ID4-aliens-suspended-in-goo style pose in a case nearby. Very cool, boys.

Here’s the entrance to the biodiversity display, with perhaps my least favorite part of the exhibit: a boring definition of biodiversity. “Marine biodiversity is the varity of life in the ocean. It is enormously complex. Scientists try to make sense of this diversity by organizing marine organisms according to evoluntionary . . . zzzz” Come on, guys! You can do better than that! How about “Biodiversity is the blizzard of lifeforms that coat the planet with bizarre beauty. It is nematode trapping fungi, slime nets, and nudibranchs that ripple through the water like Spanish dancers. . . ”

Sigh. Fortunately, the rest of the exhibit made up for this lapse. Although organized a bit confusingly, it was a nice blend of museum specimens, photographs, and strategically chosen videos that startled viewers with short clips of subjects like cephalopods’ astounding shapeshifting abilities. Some examples:

Laurie again, with the echinoderms.

Various worms, including gorgeous polychaete annelid christmas tree worm at upper left.

The very cool Ediacaran fossil of Tribrachidium, a pillow-like creature from what is commonly referred to as life’s first experiment in multicellularity. This is one of my very favorite organisms ever, and dates from over 550 million years ago. And what a stunning fossil! They had many other famous Ediacaran specimens.

And they had crinoids, or sea lillies, galore. I am sorry my photos didn’t come out better, because these specimens preserved incredible detail. Many had the architectual gestalt of gothic cathedrals. Here is a better photo from National Geographic.

And then there was this fantastic beauty — I had never seen or heard of anything like this in my life, and I even made it halfway through “Trilobites” by Richard Fortey:

There’s really only one acronym for this: W.   T.   F.

As you can see in the placard, the Hail Mary Pass of paleontology is “It may have been used for mating.” (Props to Laurie for pointing that out. : ) )

No ocean hall is complete without a giant jellyfish.

And no visit to Ocean Hall is complete without getting a fuzzy, out of focus shot of oneself with said giant jellyfish.

This picture pretty much sums up my feelings on the Sant Ocean Hall, in spite of its relatively minor shortcomings. For another perspective, see this review by the New York Times.

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