The Ocean of "The Plain Face of the Earth":
10. Deep Sea Light Dance
Sperm whales return from the Lost City to the waters off the island of Dominica, where popsicles are born. Popsicles and other whales in the colony began diving to hunt near the ocean floor. Underwater is a magical place. At a depth of fifteen meters, beautiful fan corals are everywhere, and there is still sunlight at such a depth, so there are so many creatures here. But this is not an island at all, but an underwater mountaintop, and there are undersea cliffs, and under the cliffs is a stunning blue ocean. Cayman's rock wall is the slope of a hill in the water, an eight-kilometer high mountain, and also the Himalayas at the bottom of the sea. There is shipwreck here, the shipwreck looks a little eerie, it is actually not damaged at all, like a set on the seabed. The hull seems to dissolve, the metal and seawater react chemically, and the dripping rust stalactites form "rust columns", and a large number of sea anemones and soft corals hover over them. The shipwrecked ship is really a safe place, the creatures can attach to the ship, there is no competition, they can move forward and backwards.
Offshore, smaller plankton eat tiny plants that grow in the sun all day, and larger animals eat them, and the ocean's food chain starts with it, and everyone depends on it. In the abyss the light fades away, and life can still flourish in this place that lacks light, and how vibrant. In a complex ecosystem on the surface of the ocean, there is another group of organisms that can survive underwater or on the surface. At 100 meters underwater, jellyfish swim in the space of water quality, crossing the open sea without a trace. Jellyfish are cleverly constructed to survive, the sea does not hit hard objects, so they do not need a strong body, the gelatinous body makes them equal to the buoyancy of the surrounding seawater, they live at sea for life, and evolve into organic seawater. The cells in the lower part of the jellyfish bell cover can expand and then contract rapidly, excreting the water in the body, and by spraying water to advance, the jellyfish can swim in the opposite direction; at the same time, the microorganisms are sucked in, stunned inside and then consumed. For some mysterious reason, they are called "omelette" jellyfish, but they do look a lot like fried poached eggs;
Commonly known as "sea walnuts", this strange ghost is the nemesis of small crustaceans. The ctenophore's writhing long arms frightened its prey, which fled into the wing-like ventlobes at both ends of it, unable to break free. In the middle of the ocean, hundreds of meters away from the bottom of the sea and without any objects nearby, jellyfish become the only place for other creatures. The body of one animal can become the entire world of another, and a crustacean gives birth to offspring on ctenophores and devours the host when they grow up. Crustaceans eat jellyfish, jellyfish also eat crustaceans, and it's hard to tell who's the guest or food for this feast. Most ctenophores are usually colorless and transparent, but a rugby-sized ctenophore is called "big red" because it is red.
The beautiful red ctenophore appeared, a gelatinous creature with tiny, pointed teeth that frantically flicked those cilia and refracted light like a prism to form a rainbow on the ocean floor, only to scare away their enemies; and the boat-shaped jellyfish rolled itself into a ball to escape danger. Jellyfish can also kill each other. Sea moon jellyfish sometimes swim together, and on an astonishingly large scale, and they don't know what awaits them. A monster jellyfish is trapping them, using a net of poisonous liquid that can stretch ten meters, and the stinging filaments slowly drag the sea moon jellyfish into the translucent bell jar, where they will be dissolved and differentiated. Even plankton such as jellyfish have great white shark-level enemies, and the three-inch-long melon jellyfish has a jaw, and its mouth has a row of tooth-like pointed hooks, and the melon jellyfish attaches to its prey and then expands its body to devour it, which is another advantage of the colloidal body.
Thousands of different species of jellyfish ride the current, like sailors in a strong wind, most of them lone travelers.
Tube jellyfish are the largest class of plankton, and the longest tube jellyfish can be more than fifty meters, like a string of beautiful bubbles swimming in the deep blue waters. The tube jellyfish can be said to be an animal, but it is very problematic to call it an animal. It is neither a single individual nor a group, but an animal in between. Although the tube jellyfish resembles a jellyfish, it is actually a community containing both the hydra and the jellyfish. The complex tube jellyfish contains four basic jellyfish: the swimmer, the swimming clock, which is basically a variation of the jellyfish umbrella body, and the degree of variation is not large, but it has fewer tentacles than ordinary jellyfish. Some tube jellyfish have a regularly arranged swimming bell, contracting by the rhythm of the muscles, pushing the tube jellyfish's gorgeous "round dance step" to move in circles; the floating individual, the floating sac, is a balloon, which is filled with gas and the composition is close to ordinary air. It does not move itself and is responsible for allowing the tube jellyfish to float on the surface of the sea or suspend at a certain depth. It may be a variation of jellyfish or hydra. The two most common types of tube jellyfish, the sail jellyfish and the monk hat jellyfish, have only large floating individuals and no swimming bells.
The monk's hat jellyfish is a warm pipe jellyfish that erects a gas-filled ridge fin, or floating sac, and changes the angle with the wind direction. Floating on the surface of the water, the pale blue transparent sac-shaped floating sac body, the front end is pointed, the posterior end is blunt and rounded, and the tip is raised in the shape of a dorsal peak, which is shaped like the hat of a monk monk, so it is named the monk hat jellyfish. Because its sac-shaped part resembles a Portuguese warship in the sixteenth century, it is also known as the Portuguese warship jellyfish. It's an excellent system, so that not only can they go with the flow, often being swept into harbors or beaches in large numbers, but they can also disperse across the sea; the protection of individuals, also known as covering organs or bracts, is the most peculiarly mutated structure. Usually flat, like a prism or a leaf, morphologically and functionally very different from that of jellyfish, but mutated from jellyfish; breeding individuals can split into asexually propagating buds. The bud bodies of most tube jellyfish do not detach from the mother, but attach to the mother to release sperm-egg cells, just like the reproductive organs. In addition, tube jellyfish have three basic types and thousands of derivative hydra bodies: feeding individuals, also known as siphons, are tubular structures with a separate stomach and flared mouth for each tube. A floating individual, a floating sac, can attach a large number of siphons under the floating sac, that is, a large number of feeding individuals; predators, also known as finger-shaped individuals, are slender tentacles that are responsible for catching small animals and sending them into the siphon. Some tube jellyfish have tentacles of more than fifteen meters, and they are full of small red dots, each small red dot is a series of thorn cells, and the tentacles are intertwined into a net, trapping prey, and also having the function of defense. Tube jellyfish are therefore predatory colloidal zooplankton. Under its bell-shaped head, it is connected by a string of stomachs and tentacles, each of which will use the tentacles to forage for food on its own, which is used to catch any creature that stumbles. These deadly tentacles not only fed their owners, but the tube jellyfish also solved a decades-long puzzle about a small fish with large green eyes, the large-finned posterior fish, which has a transparent shield on the top of its head and an upward-facing tubular eyes, also known as tube-eye fish.
Their mouths should not be placed in the field of vision of the eyes looking upwards, if they can't see what they are eating, how can they be effective in hunting? But its upward-looking eyes can turn into forward-looking positions, and they swim under the huge tube jellyfish, and as soon as they see the jellyfish tentacles grasping something, they turn their bodies and mouths upwards, snatch the food and turn the body down, and continue to swim forward along the long jellyfish body full of small dishes. The transparent shield on the top of the head protects the large finned fish from the spines on the tentacles of the tube jellyfish that are robbed, so the tube eye fish can live under the tube jellyfish tentacles; there is also a class of hydra reproductive individuals, responsible for reproducing offspring. Usually a short and simple tubular structure. There is no mouth and no movement, but buds can be split, and the sperm and egg of the jellyfish produced will combine to form the next generation of tube jellyfish hydra.
The structure of the tube jellyfish is not simple, it is an abnormal creature, and its characteristic is that they are group animals, which does not mean that they are social animals, but that they are a cluster. This structure is functionally superior, like specialized individuals like ant colonies and bees, working together in clusters to play different roles: the swimming bell jellyfish swim with an umbrella membrane and allow the tube jellyfish colony to advance in the water; under the bell-shaped head and floating sac, a large string of catching and eating hydras is responsible for catching, digesting, and distributing food; and some bracts are responsible for protecting the animal from attack. But they all use only one digestive tract, and once the food is digested, they can eat each other. The tube jellyfish will now demonstrate another talent, feeding a person who is less than a meter long, but it is very elastic and can stretch quite long like a spring. Tube jellyfish, known for their floating habits and extreme pain, are a terrifying animal on Earth. It sounds like a science novel, but it's not, it's made up of hundreds of independent individuals, each of whom is highly specialized, closely related to each other, and cannot survive independently. Because there are no land animals forming such a cluster structure, scientists can't help classify jellyfish, and should they think of the creature as a cluster or as an individual? Or is it to follow the usual compromise practice and give the title of superorganism? This creature is very special, different from others, it is called a superorganism, don't think about it anymore! (To be continued)
Pre-reading: The descendants of dragons are not like dragons, more like monkeys? The legendary dragon in the sky or in the sea?
More exciting please