For many years I used to join one of the dive boats that left Ao Nang Beach in Krabi province, south Thailand every morning and headed out to the dive sites of the Phi Phi National Marine Reserve with customers snorkelling and diving. We would do two, sometimes three dives and I would join each dive with my underwater camera. I would film as much of the marinelife I could and take some nice shots of the different divers. On the way back to Ao Nang at the end of the day I would cut it all together in to a few minutes of edited footage with the aim of selling people a DVD (remember those) of their dive trip.
Some days I would find amazing shots - Sea Turtles feeding, Leopard Sharks mating, Cuttlefish laying eggs, etc etc. Anytime I filmed something special and worth keeping I would add it to my library of stock clips with a vague plan of perhaps somehow being able to sell it at a later date.
On this one particular day the visibility was very good - the water was exceptionally clear and you could see easily beyond 30m, the reefs were teeming with life and the water was a deep blue. I cam across a large Jelly (people mistakenly call them Jellyfish), it was cruising in midwater and was surrounded by large fish that were repeatedly attacking smaller fish hiding under the bell of the Jelly. To be honest this is nothing exceptionally rare and I had seen this on many occasions before but today the conditions were perfect and there were no divers around to spoil the shot. I filmed it for several minutes and moved on to enjoy the rest of the dive making a mental note to stock these clips later in the week.
Several years later while I was filming Wild Oceans episodes for Earth Touch they asked me if I had any cool Jelly footage. I cut a minute or so of that old footage together and they featured it on their website and Youtube channel with a credit to me - the deal was I still owned the footage.
To this day if I do a Google search for any video clips related to baby fish living or hiding from predators under a Jelly those clips are found on all kinds of websites.
Next time you are snorkeling or diving and come across a bell shaped Jelly - take a good look under the bell and around the tentacles - there is a good chance you will find juvenile fish hiding in there.
