New UK marine record as Apolemia found off Cornwall

16/05/2006 00:00:00 The late plankton bloom in early September brought an even more unusual group of animals close to our shores to feed on it. While out watching and recording the enormous numbers of Basking sharks in early September, in depths of between 20-60 metres, Rory Goodall of Elemental Tours’ Atlantic Adventures, noticed what he thought were Rag worm-like creatures floating along a metre or so bellow the surface in the planktonic soup where the Baskers were feeding. There seemed to be hundreds if not thousands of them, ranging in size between a few centimetres up to 3 or 4 metres. A week or so later, after initial enquiries failed to pinpoint the species, Rory brought a specimen ashore and soon realised that the worm like structure was the central core of a jellyfish-like animal, and by a process of elimination, and with help from marine wildlife experts Stella Turk MBE, Raymond Dennis and Joana Doyle from CWT, narrowed it’s ID down to a little known colonial hydroid siphonophore of the Apolemia family.

’Colonial Jellyfish’
As Rory puts it for the non-scientists amongst us. ‘Basically they’re a bunch of watery suckers each around 1cm long, that team up together to create an interdependent super jelly, sometimes attaining a length of over 30 metres, with each tiny member of the colony having a specific job to do, for the good of one and all. Some will gather food, others do the swimming, a colony can even grow from one individual using asexual reproduction, and then still contain individuals of the opposite sex that help with further reproduction. These little squirts pack a punch too, and like their close relatives the Portuguese Man of War, they have specialised stinging individuals that can cause unpleasant effects if they come into contact with skin.’ Luckily, they rarely venture into shallow water, according to expert Gill Mapstone at the natural history museum. ‘They usually frequent very deep water off the continental shelves of the world’s oceans, where a number of different species have been identified, feeding on plankton and fish. They are also extremely fragile, and those in the SW at present will probably break up as the autumn gales set in.’ There is anecdotal evidence that they have been seen by divers in the UK, but local marine biologist DR. Paul Gainey thinks this could be a Cornish record. ‘It is a very exciting and unusual find, especially as it’s not on the database of Cornish records (ERICA) or the Plymouth Marine Fauna file.

Apolemia Genus
The systematics of the Apolemia genus is poorly known, but this species around the coast at present is perhaps Apolemia Uvaria, also known as the String Jellyfish. There are some widely distributed records from the South West area of the Celtic Sea, but they are all in deep water off the Continental shelf and there are no records of any in water as shallow as that reported by Rory Goodall’ After looking at photographs of various species, Rory found that the closest match comes from California in the Pacific Ocean, and he is in contact with experts in the area to find what other connections there might be.

Images
Photo-journalist Neil Hope came out on with Rory Goodall on a boat trip to take underwater shots of the basking sharks and while waiting for the baskers to swim by, took a couple of pictures of the Apolemia, not knowing what it was. It was only when Rory Goodall called him about dolphin photo’s and mentioned this article, that Neil realised he still had some fantastic images of an extremely rare group of animals.