Review of VERY venomous fierce predatory Box Jellies

Notes on the venomnous predator Tripedalia, the box jelly

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326858816_Vision_Made_Easy_Cubozoans_Can_Advance_Our_Understanding_of_Systems-Level_Visual_Information_Processing

 

(diagrams from above article)

lives in complex mangrove root environ.
eats copepods that congregate in light shafts in the roots

video of Tripedalia in mangrove forest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4PFWBOm5g8

4 behaviors:
night day: as it darkens the jelly sinks to the bottom and holds onto a root to settle for night, so it doesn't get swept out of its hunting grounds.  when day comes it swims back to surface

it swims towards the mangrove areas so it doesn't get washed out to sea

it detects shafts of light, when light, it decreases bell contractions and stays in light to eat copepods.  if it drifts out of light it quickly increases contractions to swim back into shaft of light.  is it random like bacterial chemotaxis or can it AIM back into the light shaft?

it detects vertical bars on visual field, diagonal bars a little less and horizontal bars not so much.  the sharper the image, the faster the response (sharper means closer!).  the response is to quickly turn around and swim away, so it doesn't collide with and injure itself on the roots.

the last 2 behaviors are mediated by camera type eyes with irises, lense and couple hundred photodetector cells.  definitely responding to edges across visual field.

there is a nerve net of ~1000 neurons connecting each of their 4 eyes to muscles.

 

Evolution is fun!

This striking Marble outcrop was fun to chance upon!

There's an anomalous marble formation just south of Berlin NY on rt 22, quite surprising to chance upon it.  I believe the story is that it's part of an older part of the continent. then the local shales, Rensselaer Plateau graywacke etc.. called the Taconic Klippe got shoved over that part of the continent.  this small patch of marble managed not to get covered!

here we see a grand outcrop of very light colored (white/grey, hint of blue) marble with lots of criss crossy fractures and some layers are quite weathered into dozens of pages like a book

Here we see a section that has more blocky fracture than layered weathering.

Here I'm holding a chunk that has fallen off of one of the weathered layers from the first picture and the actual rock has weathered into mm thin sheets like pages of a book.  If I let go, it falls to pieces!

Here is a block with more conchoidal fracture, not weathered and quite hard.  Tho... you can see vague roughly parallel lines in it that you can imagine will one day weather into the pages of the image above.

The southern end of this outcrop got a little messy.  I'm not sure what I'm looking at.  It was VERY hard and difficult to get samples.  Some quartz in there maybe.

Is that quartz?  I must go back and investigate.

go look for calcite it is growing everywhere around you.

these beauties were growing on a shale outcrop just south of Ashokan Resevoir in NY.

 

These were growing on the face of a very metamorphosed road cut just west of Willmington VT on Rt. 9.

 

 A warty calcite crust with a green layer inside it. never did get around to crushing some under the microscope to see what was growing in there. was the green biofilm growing the calcite? growing on a limestone outcrop in Rosendale NY. downtown Rt. 213

 

When and how and whether exposed or inside fractures and how long it took for all these calcite growths to grow, I have no clue. woud be cool to learn. I suspect the one with the green (living?) layer in it is contemporary.

 

Quartz Veins In Outcrops

 Here I will collect all the quartz veins i've found so far.  they are ubiquitous, at least in shale outcrops.

the Earth is constantly heaving and hawing and cracking, and hot fluids supersaturated with dissolved silica come seeping up under pressure to fill the cracks.  Does the pressurized fluid help make the cracks?

Often we can see parts of oucrop that have slid past other parts when a crack forms between them.  Often we can see a smooth surface along this crack with paralell striations on it, called slickensides.  Often there are quartz veins against the slickenside.  Does the quartz filling in the crack aid in the rock being able to slide?  Does it cause the slide?  Or does it come in AFTER the slide?  I do not know.

Often the quartz vein will have nice crystals, if it wasn't entirely full of quartz and the crystals have room to grow.  Supposedly you can find lots of cool minerals in these, but i have not found them yet.

1) Rt 209 just north of Ellenville NY.

 

 

  

Rt 2 (congress street) up the hill from Troy, NY past the first traffic light

 

 

   

Hmm... I had thought that I had more. Well, at least these are the two with quartz veins and slickensides.