Every summer thousands of bluebottles and their accompanying predators are washed ashore on NSW beaches.
Despite their potentially dangerous sting, the bluebottle is an amazingly beautiful creature. I wanted to demonstrate this with careful lighting and composition. Commonly mistaken for a jellyfish although it is not, it is actually more akin to coral. Similar to corals, a single bluebottle is a whole colony of individual organisms. The main organism is the quite obvious float, beneath that are suspended polyps. Each group of polyps have their own separate job, which include digestion, reproduction and of course, stinging!
So a bluebottle is actually an amazing floating city of animals co-existing in a symbiotic relationship. The bluebottle is not without its predators, whenever the thin blue line arrives the predacious Violet Snail and Glaucus Marginatus Nudibranch won’t be far behind.
Also showing at Customs House until 31 May 2015.
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