Bioluminescence
Description and Comments
Lots of bioluminescence in Braveboat Harbor (in York, ME). We don't know what these were but were kayaking around 10 pm, Aug 1 from the mouth to the inland point of the harbor and saw lots of large (1 mm or so) sparks in the wakes and along the prows of our kayaks, also if we agitated the water with our hands. The luminescence was large--seemed bigger than what I'd expect from an algae--think it was some kind of zooplankton--not diffuse luminescence. My son thought that one that he trapped on his hand had a 'Y' shape. These weren't giant---I had luminescence on my hand but couldn't discern the organism producing it. Very cool though!
Type of organism
Other
Quantity
100
Latitude
43.10
Longitude
-70.66
Comments
Those could be a mixture of
Those could be a mixture of plankton, but even the tiny sparks could be phytoplankton (dinoflagellates). They aren't so small as to be diffuse, and can look like bright discrete points. Thanks for letting us know!
Thanks for the information on
Thanks for the information on this. I write a local nature column and was hoping to talk about bioluminscent plankton this for an upcoming column--since they are out there in such great numbers. I won't have time to try for a plankton tow for a couple weeks so was going to talk about the experience and then elaborate on the variety of bioluminscent organisms out there. Any help you could give me would be great---in particular, any photo that is relatively high resolution of some kind of representative bioluminscence or bioluminscent organism would be great. Do you think dinoflagellates are a good bet? I'm not sure how big comb jellies get around here but thought these seemed too small.
By the way, I also teach high school and love showing your jellies video!
Thanks!
-Sue