ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Although the ocean covers the majority of your world, we know very little about it and its animals. It has been said that we know more about the Moon than we do about the ocean.
Studying water organisms presents a considerably greater task than studying land animals. First of all, it is far more difficult to locate aquatic organisms. Secondly, large parts of the ocean have poor visibility, and thirdly, the amount of time we can remain underwater is limited.
The frigid Atlantic seas along Cape Town's shoreline are abundant in plankton. This frequently results in plankton blooms, resulting in low visibility and making long-term investigations challenging. On this particular day, I was fortunate enough to have decent enough visibility to take a photo that provides some idea of the amount of Box jellyfish (Carybdea branchi) gathered together. When one considers that this was only one of a few "columns" in the area and that the spaces between the "columns" were filled with masses of jellyfish that remained at a lower level, the full enormity of this aggregation becomes more understandable.
The exact reason why these jellyfish assemble in such large numbers and construct these "columns" remains unknown.

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