The West Wind Drift, a mighty ocean current that circles the world, west to east, north of Antarctica and south of every other continent. It is a cold current rich in dissolved gases and as it is squeezed between the Antarctic Peninsula and Tierra Del Fuego it speeds up and part of its flow shoots north. As the northward moving current encounters the shallows, where the Falkland Islands perch, deep, nutrient-rich water is forced to the surface creating ideal conditions for the growth of tiny plants collectively called phytoplankton, as well as for magnificent forests of giant kelp. The kelp plants can grow as much as twelve inches a day, obtaining heights in excess of eighty feet!
This is a strange world, a jungle of huge plants in a broth of microorganisms, all of which forms the base of a monumental food chain. The tiny phytoplakton are eaten by equally small animals called zooplankton, from the Greek root for wanderer, the same root for the word planet--those who wander willy-nilly through the Zodiac. One of the predators of the zooplankton is the comb jelly. They are mostly transparent, with eight rows of tiny hairs, cilia, whose rhythmic beating is their mechanism of movement and source of beauty. The beating of the cilia occurs in pulses that are reflective causing beads of light, blue, yellow, and green, to flow across their surface, making it look like some bizarre creature in a science fiction movie.
The comb jelly in the photo, named Pleurobrachia, is about two inches long with five-inch "tentacles". The tentacles are presently not expanded, they are wrapped up like a sail around a mast, the animal is traveling. When Pleurobrachia is hunting, the tentacles unravel into a huge net that is used to catch plankton. This is but one of the many creatures we encountered today in the kelp forest for which the plankton is a movable feast.
