Crystal Jellyfish at Walpole Bay

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When I first stumbled across the crystal jellyfish at Walpole Bay, I didn’t know 100% what I was looking at because it wasn’t a jellyfish I’d ever seen before. There are 5 or 6 common jellyfish in the UK that you will see all over, and there are some that are more common in different areas. But the crystal jellyfish wasn’t one that was mentioned at all.

And so I spent a lot of time in the tidal pool that day, cause we love to set up our car, is almost like a mobile beach hut. So we bought, a brolly and we’ve got a stand to put it in, couple of folding chairs. And then my late grandma had, an obsession with beach huts and would have one every couple of, every summer we would have them for a couple of weeks.

And she had what we call grandma’s box, which is like a starter kit for her, her beach hut. So it had all sorts of things that you’d need, like string and a shower curtain so you could put that up and that you wouldn’t need to keep opening or closing the doors when you got changed. And she’d literally thought of everything. They’ve got mugs and matches and card games, and there was even kind of like cutlery and napkins. And this hadn’t been used in more than a decade. And I inherited the box because I love getting a beach hut. So it just seemed to me, I’ve been on a waiting list to try and get a beach hut permanently at some of the bays for years, and given up.

So I just thought, why don’t we try and fill the car up and then we can go for whole days and then, Walpole Bay is lovely, if you get in early enough, that you can kind of open your car out and then pop everything around it, and sit with your, your chairs, facing the sea and spend the day there.

So that’s what I’d done, the day that we had discovered the crystal jellyfish. And so I’d got my four camera batteries, and then I was swapping them over, recharging them off a USB charger so I could keep going back in. And it was a balmy hot day, so it was just so refreshing and beautiful to be in the sea.

And I must have come across about 10 or 12 of these, these jellyfish that I hadn’t seen before. So I spent a lot of time photographing them. And just watching them really. And one of the things with shooting in a tidal pool is that it is transient. So you know that you’ve only got that moment with these things in the water, because as soon as the water of the tide comes over the tidal pool wall and high tide comes the whole tidal pool system, in terms of what’s caught in there, changes.

And so it always feels a little bit like a kind of lottery, as to whether there’s going to be anything interesting to, to snorkel with, depending on what’s come in on that tide. And so the crystal jellyfish were that that day and I did a lot of reading around about them. And they are rare to the UK. They’re usually found in the East Pacific Ocean. And there’s a thought now that perhaps they are becoming more common in the UK because they go through a phase in their life where they polyp and they to do this, they need to polyp onto a hard surface. So often it can be concretes of harbour walls. So, obviously the tidal wall has a hard wall, but it can also be on boat hulls.

And as I mentioned in the Aurora picture, there’s a lot of light pollution from mega boats that are waiting to go into the freeports of London. So it’s entirely possible that the crystal jellyfish are polyped onto the boat from other parts of the world, and then something has triggered them to move into their medusa-phase which is when they are in this free form, moving around the ocean, when they are hanging off the coast of Margate, that perhaps something that’s been in the East Pacific has brought this round.

The sea temperature is such, and the conditions are right that this polyp is triggered into, popping off from the polyp phase and forming the medusa, then suddenly we get this influx of jellyfish that are rare and have never been in our waters. And I think the question that people are starting to ask around jellyfish is they are like the kind of canary in the coal mine for what’s happening with the climate emergency, because they’re the fastest adapting species on Earth

And if anything is happening that needs adaptation, too, they are going to always naturally evolve for that evolutionary benefit. And so the fact that these jellyfish are present in the UK waters could be reflective of the fact that our waters are heating up, and then conditions are such that species like this one can thrive here, but they aren’t native to here.

And then it’s sort of like, well, what does that mean to our native ocean? What do they predate on? What does that then impact on in terms of… So it’s quite huge when something like this shows up as to what that will do with the environment or the impact that will have with the environment and why they are showing up like this.

And so I am watching the sea with a keen eye to see as and when jellyfish start to return this year. I’ve noticed that things are in bloom a lot earlier, I’ve got peonies in my garden, they’re usually like a, when into May kind of plant, that flowers and again, like the oilseed rape fields are out already this year in early April. That has always been a May flower. And I know that from shooting weddings that May, weddings are always like had oilseed rape fields in the background, and so it’s alarming to see all of these things in nature happening sooner.

And so as someone who lives on the coast, who can observe the coast and witness this and document it, I really feel like a role of my photography in that kind of citizen science capacity of monitoring these things that are happening in our natural environment just to see as and when those things happen and if they happen, and then reporting that into things like the marine Conservation Society, and other marine organisations. Because these observations are really like en masse, quite critical to painting a scene of where we are, with our, our climate at the moment.