Amy and Cnidarian

This is my friend Amy looking relaxed and happy during our dory tour of Budd Inlet in August. Amy was steering the boat while I was doing all the hard work rowing it at .05 knots an hour on flat water at high tide. This was the day we encountered the masses of moon jellies and lion's mane jellies. The latter jellies were enormous (about eighteen inches across with a good ten feet of tentacle) but we were both surprised to learn that the lion's mane is the world's largest jelly fish and that it was in Budd Inlet. I guess we imagined it would be found cavorting with the Giant Squid, the Blue Whale, and other creatures of mythic proportions somewhere in open ocean. 

 On a recent trip to Washington, DC, Amy and I toured the Natural History Museum and encountered a model of what is likely the world's largest specimen the world's largest cnidarian (below).

 We were quite happy to have not encountered a lion's mane this size on our dory ride, though I am sure we would have gotten our pictures in the paper and not just in a blog posting.

 Our tour of the museum's natural wonders followed a visit to the National Gallery of Art where I ruined Amy's appreciation for the great masterpieces by commenting on the clouds in each one. Now I am done with jellyfish and will resume my Still Life with Clouds work.

More on Moon Jellies

 After posting my blog yesterday, I decided to do a little more research on the life cycle of the moon jellies in Puget Sound or elsewhere. I didn't find much in my natural history books, marine life field guides, or on the Internet. So I sent an e-mail to David Jamison, one of the marine biologist who conducts the popular public Pier Peer events at Boston Harbor Marina. (David, you may recall, also wrote weekly column on creatures of Puget Sound for The Olympian.) 

  I asked David what he knew about the summer aggregations of moon jellies. Here is his reply:    

As to the moon jellies, they do tend to gather into groups Budd Inlet every August and Sept which is about when they begin to die off. They also occur in groups in other areas of Puget Sound. This is not a new phenomena as I have seen them do this for over thirty years that I have been in the local area. There can be hundreds to thousands of individuals.

I have not found a satisfactory explanation for the aggregations. Some have said there is a reproductive reason as there are both males and females swimming at the same time, however they breed from the spring through the summer with the young growing in special areas of the swimming bell of the adult till the fall when the young move off to hard surfaces to form a polyp. Others have said it is due to their method of swimming against water flow during the day. Some have implied that they can orient relative to compass directions when they swim.

Thank you David for this satisfying and humbling reply. To think that this "lower" life form--spineless, simple, and seemingly passive--could orient itself to the North, South, East, or West is remarkable given that a large percentage of homo sapiens seem unable to point to the North when asked or navigate their way out of their driveway without a GPS unit! 

How marvelous that these abundant, relatively common, and easy to observe jellyfish still hold mysteries and perhaps the upper hand on methods for finding mates.

NOTE: The next Pier Peer is October 23, from 8-9:30 p.m. These events are very popular; space is limited (isn't it always?) reservations are required. Go to: People for Puget Sound to reserve before it's too late! 

cn u say cnidarian?

   It's much easier to say "jelly fish," but these gelatinous creatures are not fish. They belong to a group of marine invertebrates called cnidarian and pronounced nye-dare-ee-un.

Late last month two species made quite a showing in lower Budd Inlet: the Moon Jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) and the Lion's Mane (Cyanea capillata).

    My friend Marian first alerted me to the Moon Jellies, which appeared in masses called "smacks". She was out rowing with her team in the dory and sent me the beautiful photographs below--taken from her cell phone--and the following note: 

The area they congregated in was about 25' x 25' x 10' deep (conservatively). We hazarded a guess of hundred thousand jellies!!! Wow, what an experience. We just drifted around over them and watched their beautiful movements. I picked up a small one and then a larger one and was amazed at how dense it was. Very heavy for it's size. I expected it to be about as heavy as water, but it was about twice that heavy. Photos were taken with cell phone cameras as we didn't have a real camera with us!

The white rings on top are actually gonads (the sex organs)--immature ones. The "ripe" ones are yellowish pink or violet on female jellies, and yellow, yellow-brown, rose-colored on males. Young jellyfish are called polyps, mature ones, medusa.

Click here

 to see a fabulous short video of the moon jelly life cycle, complete with sound track. I am trying to track down (next blog?) information on the annual appearance of  these smacks in Budd Inlet.

The photo below looks like Monet's impressionistic painting of his water gardens at Giverny.

 The next day, I rowed over to Ellis Cove and saw another type of cnidarian, the Lion's Mane jelly (below). These jellies (also called "sea blubber or sea nettle) were huge--the world's largest jelly fish. They can reach 8 feet in diameter, though in Puget Sound they grow to about 18 inches across. The whitish, opaque bell is divided into lobes from which 150 shaggy tentacles hang; some tentacles on the specimens I saw were about 10 feet long. This jelly is highly toxic and causes severe burning and blistering. Using its much-folded membranous lips and feeding tube snout, it feeds on small fish and crustaceans.  

 In my Audubon guide to the Pacific Coast, the authors note that, "In Sir Arthur Conan Doyles' story 'The Adventures of the Lion's Mane,' Sherlock Holmes solves a homicide caused by contact between the victim and this medusa in a tidepool."  

Word Clouds

  This is what my post Too Good to Be True looks like as a Word Cloud. Without reading all the words in this  "cloud" or in my original post, you can quickly discern that the post features an osprey in a lake and also something about water and a swim.

  My tech-savvy husband introduced me to the world of Word Clouds--a software that resizes words in a document based on their frequency of use: Frequently used words appear larger; less frequently, smaller. This tool has become recently popular for the search engine optimization of web pages. I am not exactly sure what this means, but it has to do with making spiders more effective at crawling (and finding stuff). Being an accidental naturalist, I am not interested in searching for things more efficiently on the web or elsewhere, but I do love the way a Word Cloud looks. My husband tried to shape the posting on the osprey into a raptor shaped cloud, but the only choice available was songbird-like. It was, as he said, kind of Musak-y.

  This particular software--Tagxedo--generated a somewhat artistic cloud-shaped interpretation--a poetic rendition suitable for framing or posting on a blog. You can turn poems, speeches, love letters, whatever you can write into a Word Cloud, also called a Tag Cloud. Wordle is another popular Word Cloud generator.

  Not all software produces this kind of cloud, nor are all Word Cloud users are interested in artistry. Nor are all users interested in web page optimization. Many are interested in understanding quickly and graphically what is being stressed in a particular document, say a grant proposal, white paper, or business document. While the actual words in the document may say one thing, the Word Cloud version of the document shows that the emphasis on certain words say another. Or, that my using a certain word frequently, the author may reveal subconsciously what he or she does not state directly. 

  You can feed in the URL from a customer website and get the frequency display can give you hints about their values, priorities, subtle “messages” which might or might not be intended. For example (in ten seconds or less) you can turn the homepage of  the USGS into a Word Cloud and see the prevalence of the words “hazards” and “quick,” followed by “climate change” and “science” and “water." Anything meaningful there?

If you go to the Nisqually Land Trust website, you can learn that "acres," "mount rainier," and "wildlife" are important, and to a slightly lesser degree, "community," and "partner."  This makes sense as the NLT has recently acquired 600 acres of property that is the Mount Rainier Gateway Forest Reserve for wildlife habitat and that they relied on the efforts of the community and various funding partners to accomplish this. The Word Cloud tells you that this accomplishment is a very important one to the Nisqually Land Trust. And rightly so.

   Word Clouds are also great for writers who need a new tool for helping vary their vocabulary. If you generate a Word Cloud from your book proposal and see that the words PLEASE, DESPERATE, and STARVING are at an enormous 72 pt, you might want to eliminate most, if not all of these particular words.

   I am imaging an Audio Word Cloud in which a recorded talk or speech could be played back with the most frequently used words spoken the loudest. That would be hilarious. Imagine listening to an Audio Word Cloud of a teenager shouting LIKE, YOU KNOW, WHATEVER and whispering everything else.

  A few other thoughts:

  Will Word Clouds make us less careful readers? (I don't have time to read this, but I can get a gist by scanning the outsized words). 

  Do Word Clouds make words less meaningful?  (I see that it's important, but I don't know what it means).

  Is there anything wrong with playing with words? (No.)

  Does anyone remember George Herbert's "Easter Wings" of 1633 ? The man was ahead of his time!