Giant 'Phantom' Jellyfish Found With Entourage of Fishy Passengers Hitching a Ride - ScienceAlert
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If you're just a wee fish swimming around the big, scary ocean, it can help to have a bit of muscle on your side. For some fish, that's the protection offered by stinging coral. For others, it's adhering to the sandpaper skin of a deadly shark. And for one species of fish, it may be cozying up to one of the most enigmatic denizens of the deep – the giant phantom jellyfish (Stygiomedusa gigantea). During an ROV dive into mesopelagic waters off the coast of Argentina, marine researchers beheld a rare and stunning sight. They witnessed a majestic jelly languidly pulsing through the darkness, and with it, an entire entourage of juvenile rudderfish (Centrolophus niger), flitting beneath its bell and among its enormous, trailing arms. It's an interspecies relationship scientists have suspected for more than 50 years – and now, hundreds of meters below the waves off Patagonia, here it is. "Both are poorly known and rarely observed cosmopolitan mesopelagic species, representing the first documented observation of this association in the deep ocean," writes a team led by marine ecologist María Emilia Bravo of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina.
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