1 mauve stinger (pelagia noctiluca) and 5 fried egg (cotylorhiza tuberculata) jellyfish (and a suggestion or two)

Description and Comments

typical swim today. the water was was pretty clear and calm. no waves, no wind. i saw one small mauve stinger and a handful of the fried egg jellyfish. two of the fried eggs had 4-5 fish companions each. otherwise nothing too unusual. still some of the spawning as previously mentioned.

i would like to suggest a better means of reporting a non-sighting. as that there is the possibility of having regular contributors, it might be helpful to have better means to make note of times where there are no jellyfish sightings. it would be more useful in your data collecting. especially in cases like myself where i go swimming as often as possible, at least several times a week, weather and season permitting. a lot of times i do not see any jellyfish. there is always the possibility that i could contribute over decent period of time at the same place. i would suggest a slight change in your website. you do have the "clean seas" option, but checking this, especially on a regular basis, will clutter your data collection. maybe if it is checked, close the quantity field and file the data given on another page. or since quantity is a required field in submitting any report, you might add a 0 field, maybe after the 100+ quantity. but something, that if used, would not be posted like the other postings. this zero field can have a qualifier. this would be more useful because as of right now all my submissions make it look like i see jellyfish everyday. which is not the case. even if i submitted a non-sighting, it would still be marked as a one quantity, which it would not be, and it would still be posted with all the others. clean seas is a little bit clumsy and not a good field for data collecting, even for amateurs.

you might also add a more advanced field, where if selected further options for weather conditions, waves, water clarity, currents, etc would become available. this would be used by your more advance and regular contributors. it would deepen your data field sets.

maybe next season i will start marking non-jellyfish days. :D it is too late in this season to start and be consistent. ;)

Author

alchemy149

Type of organism

Jellyfish

Quantity

6

Latitude

43.19

Longitude

6.58

Comments

jellywatch Wed, 09/15/2010 - 03:39

Thanks for the suggestion (and for all the sightings -- we need more regular contributors like this). For the moment, as you noticed, we just have the Clean Seas option for reporting zero jellies -- one clean sea = zero of any number of species. The system certainly can be improved, but we'd need to think about the best solution. I wouldn't worry too much about having quantity 1 when the category is clean sea. Presently, it would be easy to filter all the Clean Seas sightings and use them as zeroes in a time series. Zero as a field seems like it would require separate report of *all* the things you did not see -- zero ctenophores, zero box jellies, zero Pelagia, etc.

Along these lines, we are thinking about other ways to present the data -- image gallery, time series tools, and contour plots integrating the data from a region, user, or location. These will make it easier to determine trends as well, and distinguish reports of one small Pelagia (a non-event) from 100+ Pelagia (a bloom).

Best wishes, and thanks again.