Ancient wonders

LEAD PIX: Not so common: Aurelia aurita, aka the 'common' jellyfish, just one of the many types of these etheral creatures that live in our oceans. -- Wikimedia Commons

Jellyfish might scare some people out of the water, but these most mysterious of ocean animals are an extraordinary sight.

IT is time to celebrate the beauty of jellyfish. Eerie and almost ethereal, they float through the ocean, rising and falling like the warmed wax blobs in a lava lamp. Officially, because it has no strong means of self-propulsion (beyond a lackadaisical expanding and contracting of its gelatinous skirts), the jellyfish is actually one big bit of zooplankton, subject to currents and upswellings, a nomadic organism roaming the world’s wide blue waters in a dreamy existence of its own. Would it not be wonderful to be a jellyfish?