It's alive!
A hydromedusa (top), cerinula larva (middle), and claim (bottom). Photos by Declan Lane. Recently, two of my high school interns asked for a lesson. We have been working for months on sorting plankton from the Arctic, but all these samples are preserved in ethanol. They don't move. They just hang there in the liquid, begging to be sorted. My interns wondered what it was like to sort live plankton instead. Of course I was happy to show them. We grabbed a plankton net from my lab, dragged it through the water off the dock in Eel Pond, and looked at the sample together under the microscopes. It is so satisfying for me to introduce new students to science - I love guiding their curiosity, listening to their exclamations, and showing them the incredible diversity in the ocean. The sample we collected happened to be full of medusae. If you've heard the word "medusa" before, it was probably in context of Greek mythology, but the woman with snakes for hair is not what