When we head out two days later, the morning swells are just high enough to make me glad to have taken a couple of Dramamine. The Ventana will go down twice today, once to retrieve the MRS and then again to do some leisurely shopping for animals it can bring up in its separate collection canisters. Before long, the MRS comes into view, almost as if it were a piece of underwater wreckage being sought by Robert Ballard’s Titanic-hunting cameras. Somehow it looks as if it’s been down here for decades; the device’s cables, lying unattached on the ocean floor, now resemble tentacles.
Once the Ventana has captured the MRS and brought its cargo up on deck, the samples—including the porky red jelly, the Voragonema—are transferred to the ship’s lab, taken out of their canisters, and put into small plastic tubs. Back at MBARI, Reisenbichler will measure the animals and then “blot” them to get the water out. Next he will weigh and freeze them. Later the creatures will be analyzed for protein, lipids, and total carbon content. The last is a standard form of measurement that helps to quantify respiration, but there’s an additional, urgent aspect to such readings now. “We’re trying to assess the amount of carbon sequestered in the bodies of these animals as part of the ocean’s carbon budget, something that has not been done accurately before,” Robison says. The goal is a better appreciation of the huge role that jellies play in the marine food web, as well as a more complete inventory of how carbon (fundamental to both life and climate) is distributed in the ocean.
Unburdened of the MRS, the Ventana makes a second dive, ready to scoop up whatever looks scientifically interesting. A Solmissus, the huge spiderlike jellyfish on which Kevin Raskoff did part of his doctoral thesis, ventures in for a close-up. “See all this junk in here?” Robison asks, pointing to the creature’s see-through stomach. “That’s his lunch.” The Solmissus swims with its tentacles outward, hunting for prey instead of just waiting for it to blunder toward him. Only 20 years ago it was generally believed that jellies passively watched and waited for their next meal. Today, Robison says, “we know that there’s a whole group that hunts.” The youthfulness of the science comes to mind yet again when a red-striped Atolla swims into view. It really bugs him, Robison says, that we don’t know the purpose of the long white tentacle it sports amid a lot of other fringe. Some researchers think the appendage figures in reproduction; others believe it’s for catching prey.
For creatures much tougher than jellyfish—like the tongue-shaped, jelly-eating beroë that’s now nearby, its mouth resembling two fastened pieces of Velcro—the Ventana’s “suction sampler” is ready for action.
“OK,” Robison says. “Pump’s on.”
“Be gentle,” cautions Reisenbichler.
“Puree?” asks the pilot at the joystick.
“Liquefy!” Robison says, laughing, before the pilot captures it nicely intact. No wonder the jellyfish simply vanished in many earlier expeditions.
Weeks after the trip, Reisenbichler e-mails me the results of the MRS experiment. “While we do see some evidence of elevated oxygen consumption rates in situ for two out of the three species sampled during the last deployment, the sample numbers are too low to jump to any conclusions,” he says. Inconclusive but tantalizing, a suggestion that the jellies may indeed be doing more of everything down there. The best news of all may be word from Robison that the MRS equipment is performing “like a champ,” promising harder data ahead.
Yet a grim feeling pervades the aquatic realm. Later in the spring, Widmer tells me, “we would expect the sea lions to be ripping the top and bottom fins off the molas and throwing them around like Frisbees, skipping them on the surface. But they haven’t been doing it this year or last year or the year before”—because the molas are gone.
Widmer continues his work in a lab just 88 paces away from where Ed Ricketts, the real-life “Doc” of Cannery Row, did his—before the sardines lost their niche. Meanwhile, the proliferating jellies—breathing, multiplying, going below, moving in—seem to be following the tradition of pigeons, rats, and a handful of other adaptable creatures that prosper in our wake.
“If humans change the atmosphere and oceans to the detriment of other species,” Kevin Raskoff says, “and we find that jellies are filling in, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. The jellies are just doing what they have done for over 500 million years, and they are very, very good at it.” In a tragedy of our own making, the jellyfish, Raskoff declares, “will just be the messengers. Humans were the ones who wrote that message. We even had the chances to rewrite it over time but failed to take action.”
