Life Beneath the Ice: Short Film Showcases a Magical Portal Full of Antarctic Jellies

Filmmaker and scientist Emiliano Cimoli showed the beauty under the sea ice in a video featuring gelatinous, transparent bodies of jellyfish and comb jellies that live in Antarctica.

The short film "Life Beneath the Ice" showed in exceptional detail dozens of jellyfish, comb jellies, and soft-bodied, see-through species in McMurdo Sound. The team also saw unknown species of jellyfish and three comb jellies, according to Live Science.

Seeking Out Elusive Marine Life Beneath the Antarctic Ice

Cimoli, a co-author of the study and researcher from the University of Tasmania, shot the footage for the short film in research conducted between 2018 and 2019. He was testing the sensing equipment used to monitor algae that live under the sea ice.

Ice algae are an important part of the marine food chain and ecosystems. Cimoli wrote in the video's description on YouTube that the expeditions conducted were to investigate the abundance of ice algae and their physiology under changing light conditions.

There was a sizable viewing hole insider the tent where researchers stayed, and being an amateur videographer and photographer, Cimoli thought of sending cameras under the ice. This allowed them to seek out elusive marine life beneath the Antarctic ice to observe them in their natural habitat. This project opened a magic portal into the rarely-observed ocean ecosystem.

As Live Science reported, the video footage showed the visible surface ice; sea bottom sprinkled with pink starfish. More interestingly, it showed dramatic scenes of different species of jellyfish, comb jellies, and other gelatinous, transparent marine animals.

One of the amazing sea creatures the cameras captured was that of a Diplulmaris antarctica jellyfish. Its body pulses and ripples as it moves across the water, while inside it was its recent meal, a comb jelly. They also saw several small orange globes called hyperid amphipods.

Cimoli shared the video on YouTube and Vimeo in March 2020. Postdoctoral researcher Gerlien Verhaegen from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the lead author of the study, said that the short film was a gold mine for biologists studying jellyfish and its related species.

Vergaegean said that many of the species in the footage were first observed in the early 20th century.

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Machine Learning Enable Automatic Annotation of Videos

EurekAlert! reported that the video showed several jellies that the team can only use century-old descriptions and illustrations to compare them with because preserving them in formalin and ethanol would be unrealistic. Vergaegean said that many of the species in the footage were first observed in the early 20th century.

Fortunately, jellyfish taxonomist expert Dr. Dhugal Lindsay, senior scientist at JAMSTEC and a co-author of the study, helped identify the species. They were able to identify 12 species but noted that two jellyfish and three comb jelly species were unknown to science.

They used machine learning for video annotation of Antarctic jellyfish. Machine learning is commonly applied in various fields nowadays, from voice recognition to detecting typhoons.

Dr. Lindsay said taxonomically accurate image-based datasets are needed to train algorithms to help solve the high diversity of species that scientists encounter. This study is the first one to employ machine learning for that purpose.

They described their full study, "Life Beneath the Ice: Jellyfish and Ctenophores From the Ross Sea, Antarctica, With an Image-Based Training Set for Machine Learning," in the Biodiversity Data Journal.