Jelly Fish Beaching
I had the afternoon off & decided to go to the beach. This beach is in the Norwegian arctic, yet on a summers day the shallow water is like the Bahamas: crystal clear & a combination of vibrant blues and greens. The temperature is of course different from the bathwater Bahamas, in the shallows it is warm but farther out it turns cold.
When I arrived I found all these jellyfish washed up on the beach & floating lifeless in the shallows of the water. Maybe it was a natural occurrence, but in this age of climate catastrophe I couldn’t help but wonder if this was unusual.
was this a proper beaching, had the jellies decided to come ashore and end their lives. I had watched these jellyfish float around, seemingly without agency, going wherever the currents took them, and wondered if they had the cognition to beach themselves. Or Was it the temperature of the water, was it competition, was it apart of their reproduction patterns? was it a pattern that happened each year?
I still don’t know.
