[Previous entry: "JUST FOR FUN .......Wally Muller's walking gear."] [Next entry: "KAY MILBURN - QUEEN OF THE SEA Ron Taylor Lobster picture."]
15/07/2004: "STINGING JELLYFISH UW picture"
How much intelligence is contained within what most would consider 'a very low-level life form'?
Bathers at Melbourne's Brighton Baths, which is a bayside 'ocean' pool protected by anti-shark steel bars watched in amazement as a large jellyfish changed shape to a narrower form to pass through the bars. The jellyfish had to get out of the pool, somehow it measured the width of the bars without too much trouble.
Off Coffs Harbour underwater photographers 'harrased' an open ocean jellyfish giant by taking sufficient pictures to (a) cause the creature to spread its stingers over a much wider defensive area, maybe six times larger than the initial posture, and (b) cause the creature to dive deeper by some ten meters to avoid the bright flash.
While in Taiwan, the human intellingence has found methods to dry jellyfish into a form that is edible when reconstituted. Imagine eating jellyfish?
(How fantastic if the Taiwanese, who are proud of turning any sea creature into food, could find a method of making crown of thorns starfish edible)?
Then there is the box jellyfish with stingers that leave scars on our skin no worse than that which might be from 'an electrified whip of steel'?
Pictured is an unknown (to me) variety, a relative of the common 'pink stinger' Sydney divers know so well. Heavy rains had reduced water visibility turning blue into green.
There is intelligence within a jellyfish, but how they see, why they travel is a human mystery. Some forms on the GBR pulsate with a raibow of brilliant colours within their transparent shapes. If NASA found such creatures in space the tabloids would go berserk. Inner space is taken for granted.
