Can we take a sec to appreciate how amazing Mother Nature is? She’s a cruel mistress, sure, but she also gifts us plenty of things – some of which we’re lucky to capture on camera.
Take Byron Bay photographer Tim Samuel, who was free diving with his mate Franny Plumridge a few months ago when he came across something amazingly bizarre: a fish trapped INSIDE a jellyfish.
He posted one of the photos he took to Instagram almost 6 months ago, but it wasn’t until Discover Ocean – with it’s 661K followers – reposted that his photos went fkn gangbusters.
Check ’em out:
Have you ever seen anything like it? Neither has Tim.
He told Gizmodo what went down that day:
“It seemed completely trapped in there, like it had somehow managed to swim inside and then was unable to back itself out. The fish was able to propel the jellyfish forward and controlled its movement to an extent, the jellyfish threw it off balance though and they would wobble around, and sometimes get stuck doing circles.”
He contemplated freeing the little guy, but in the end decided against interfering.
“I decided to just let nature run its course, which was a difficult decision for me to make.”
Some marine biologists have suggested that, while it’s hard to tell from the pics alone, the fishy might be a species known as ‘juvenile trevally’, which commonly hide from other predators among the stingers of jellies; in this case, he might have got more than he bargained for, and somehow ended up inside his shield.
Maybe he survived, maybe he didn’t, but geez what a shot.
Photo: Tim Samuel Photography.
