A young girl admires the sea creatures and coral at the BioPark Acquarium.
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The Monterey Bay in central California, where this photo was taken, is home to a vast array of incredibly beautiful sea animals called jellyfish (also known as "jellies" or "sea jellies"). The bodies of these seemingly helpless quivering blobs are composed of at least 95% water. Unlike fish or crab, they are not capable of holding their shape when taken from the water. True 'jellies' are cnidarians....relatives of corals and anemones. The central area of their body consists of a digestive cavity which connects to the outside by a mouth. All cnidarians are endowed with 'nemotocysts' which are microscopic stinging and sticky structures used primarily for prey capture.
Fish in a massive floor-to-ceiling cylindrical fish-tank of marine life from the Pacific Ocean. This unique display is located among diners at the Waterbar restaurant on the Embarcadero waterfront in San Francisco, California.
Fish in a massive floor-to-ceiling cylindrical fish-tank of marine life from the Pacific Ocean. This unique display is located among diners at the Waterbar restaurant on the Embarcadero waterfront in San Francisco, California.
Monterrey Bay
California
say no more, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?
Such a strange looking lumberjack undersea. Might seem hard to see prey with a snout like that.... so the story gets stranger
"Tiny pores called ampullae of Lorenzini allow sharks and rays to detect the minute electric fields produced by their prey. These ampullae are especially common on the heads of sawfish" — Ed Yong's An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, p.303.
Some "can detect an electric field of just one nanovolt — a billionth of a volt (as faint as a AA battery with electrodes on opposite sides of the Atlantic ocean) — across a centimeter of water. It's electric sense only enters the fray at the close of the hunt, to pinpoint the exact position of its prey and guide its strike. That's why the ampullae of Lorenzini are usually concentrated around the mouth." (p.292)
The saw "is packed with ampullae, top and bottom. It greatly extends the sawfish's electrical awareness into the space ahead of it — a useful trait in turbid water. 'We find them in rivers where we can't even see our boat's propeller,' says Barbara Wueringer, who studies these animals. She showed that the saw doubles as both a sensor and a weapon. When fish swim above the saw, the sawfish slashes at them, using its sideways teeth to impale, stun, and bisect. When the wounded fish fall to the bottom, the sawfish uses the underside of it saw to find and pin them. 'Whenever I see them, I think: how is this a thing?'" (p.293)
At the giant shark tank at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas.
Jelly Fish at Sea Life Kansas City
