When I was a kid we used to go to the beaches of the Mahia peninsula most weekends. (Well, memory says 'most weekends' – it might not have been that often!). Sometimes we'd stop at the sweeping sandy shores of Blue Bay, but on other days we'd go round to the exposed rocky coast & spend happy hours messing around in the rock pools. I used to love floating my fingers past the sea anemones & feeling the tiny tugs as we touched (at the time, of course, I had no idea that those tiny tugs were the anemones discharging nematocysts into my fingers!) And to me it seemed that these intriguing little animals, which retracted into blobs of jelly when touched less gently, didn't really seem to do much.
Similarly corals – when we've snorkelled around corals I've been amazed by the forms they take and – in living corals – by their colours. But it's hard to see much actually happening.
But tonight a friend of mine posted this video – "Slow Life" – on their Facebook page. It's gorgeous, visually stunning – and it shows the hidden life of cnidarians in glorious technicolour. Best on the big screen, I think; I'm looking forward to showing it to my first-year class next week.
Enjoy!
herr doktor bimler says:
It’s not all cnidarians, mind you — the opening sequence is a polychaete feather-duster worm, and the closing scenes are close-ups of an echinoderm.
Alison Campbell says:
Pedant! ;)It’s mostly cnidarians…
herr doktor bimler says:
Not pedantry, so much as concern that some cnidarian enthusiast might watch the video and be disappointed. I care about the finer feelings of your readers even if you don’t.
There were also some scenes of some kind of tunicate.
Alison Campbell says:
I care about the finer feelings of your readers even if you don’t.
Ouch!
I agree, there’s a lot of stuff there; it was the cnidarians that really caught my attention, though.