Jellyfish Lake Research Paper

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Jellyfish Lake


Jellyfish Lake is a marine lake. It is connected to the ocean by underwater tunnels. It was formed 12,000 years ago when the ocean water went down and left water trapped inside on an island along with animals that inhabit this lake now. There are two layers of this lake, an oxygenated top layer (mixolimnion) and a bottom anoxic layer (monimolimnion). These layers never mix because the lake is stratified. The top 3 meters of the anoxic layer is bacteria. One of the species of bacteria is purple photosynthetic sulfur bacterium. This layer of bacteria absorbs all the sunlight so that the anoxic layer is dark, but clear. There is depressions of limestone that surrounds the inside of the lake. The size of the lake is 460 m by 160m, surface area- 0.057 sq km and a depth of 50m. There is two species of jellyfish in this lake; Golden jellyfish and Moon jellyfish. …show more content…

Their group name is smack and they are invertebrates. They group up around the western shore before sunrise, and around 6 am, they start swimming east towards the sunlight. Once they have almost reached the eastern shore, they stop so that they are not under the trees shadows, where their primary predators live, anemones. In the afternoon, when the sun slowly slips back towards the western shore, the jellies follow, awaiting there until dawn. This daily migration is also beneficial for the lake. As the jellies swim back and forth, they churn the water that contains nutrients and small organisms that are the base of this ecosystems food chain. These jellyfish don’t just like to bask in the sun, they need it to survive. Algae lives inside them called zooxanthellae. This algae provides the jellyfish with energy by using

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