Not long ago I was having lunch at a local burger stand when one of the owners of a near by scuba park came by to say hello and to ask if I was going to be out at the park soon because some fresh water jelly fish had been seen. He also wanted to know if I would take a picture or two of the fresh water jelly fish and share it with the park. I said I hoped to be out at the park in a week or so and I would endeavor to take a picture or two since I had never seen a fresh water jelly fish before. And of course I would be glad to share anything I was able to shoot because I have always thought it was pretty important to have a good scuba park nearby for divers to work on diving skills.

So in between I did a little bit of looking on the internet to see what had been written about fresh water jelly fish. I also gave some thought to whether I ever remember seeing a fresh water jelly fish in the scuba ranch or the predecessor clear springs scuba park. I have been going out to the park for over a decade so I looked through several images and racked my memory and concluded that I had never seen a fresh water jelly out at the park or anywhere else for that matter. So I started looked through the internet and discovered there is a fair amount that has been written about fresh water jelly fish. For one thing, they are an invasive species that are thought to have come from China from the Yangtze River. Now how they got to the United States is a bit unclear. For my imagination, I suppose it’s another bait bucket transfer. They probably hitched a ride on the bottom of a ship that made its way from China to the Great Lakes perhaps much like zebra muscles, another invasive species.

So the next thing I wondered was how big are these critters? Well it turns out not too big. A fully grown adult is about the size of a quarter. My next inquiry, was well am I going to likely get stung trying to take a picture of a fresh water jelly? After a little reading it sounded like even though fresh water jelly’s have stinging cells similar to their saltwater cousins, it appears that their small size meant that the stinging cells are not able to penetrate human skin. Yippee.

So then my thought was what lens and port combination should I use. I quickly eliminated a wide angle lens with a dome port because while it would be easy to shoot the critter that way it would diminish the size of an already small critter. So my next thought was to use a 105 mm macro lens. I fairly soon rejected that thought because while the 105mm lens would give me more working distance from the critter, given the relatively small amount of visibility in the lake, I feared that I might have some real challenges getting a good shot. So I started thinking about a black water dive I did in the Philippines this year and remembered that I had used a 60mm lens and had had some success shooting relatively small creatures at night that were part of the great migration each night. So I settled on the 60mm lens and added to the kit a wet diopter to magnify the critter assuming I could get a decent shot.

So I went out to the scuba ranch and started looking for jelly fish. Well I found some, most of them were down by Sisco the shark, but there were a few along the shoreline in about 15 to 20 feet of water. Trying to shoot the little guys proved to be less than easy. Similar to black water diving since the creatures are so small the tiny amount of pressure wave that can come off moving an underwater camera into position is enough to push the jelly fish around in the water column. So rule one that I learned was keep the camera in position and be ready to shoot before you find the jelly. Now the tough part, the jelly’s live in the water column so you can’t cheat and put a fin down in the bottom of the lake to stay steady. So it means that when you find a subject you have to get close, but not too close. You have to stay steady and not move and you have to hope that the critter doesn’t swim out of the frame. And of course, since I figured it would be easier to spot a critter in daylight, which was corrrect, I had to shoot with inward focused strobes in an open water column in order to create a black background. It took a while to get any workable shot, but it was an interesting experiment. I was not able to use the diopter so I have will have to go back and try again in the near future and hopefully get even closer to the subject. Be prepare to take quite a few shots to get a good useable one. And as I have found you can register your find with the USGS and there is a marine biologist who is creating a database of sittings of fresh water jelly fish. So you can register what you find. Have fun and keep shooting.