Claire Waring, The Country Smallholder’s bee correspondent, has recently been awarded first place in the Underwater Category of the Spanish ‘Memorial Maria Luisa International Mountain, Nature and Adventure Photo and Video Contest’, for her picture of a ‘sea gooseberry’.
In the miniature world of the plankton, the bioluminescent sea gooseberry uses its tentacles to catch its prey which consists of copepods and other plankton. It is a comb jelly less than 12mm long, and was found in plankton collected from the sea off the Isle of Mull, Scotland. It swims by beating the longitudinal rows of bioluminescent cilia along its body. The two long retractable tentacles can be up to 20 times its body length. They are armed with special sticky cells (colloblasts) used to ensnare its prey.
This sea gooseberry was placed in a Petri dish which was held in a clamp. The image was shot with a hand-held100mm macro lens, with a flash illuminating the dish from below.To get a clear image, it proved quite tricky to manoeuvre the sea gooseberry gently towards the middle of the dish without damaging its colloblasts. Afterwards it was returned to the sea at the same spot from which it was collected.
Claire says, ‘I am surprised and delighted that this small creature has been recognised among the images of amazing animals such as blue whales, crabs and starfish. The little things in life are so important and so often overlooked. Plankton Rules!’
The award ceremony takes place in Oviedo, Spain, on 17 May.
Picture caption: Claire’s picture of a miniature bioluminescent sea gooseberry.
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