A Salp’s Last Supper: A Transparent Tragedy

At first glance, the photo looks almost fake, like someone did an X-ray of the ocean. A glassy tube hangs in the dark, packed with a messy tangle of glowing shapes. Stare a little longer and it clicks.

You are looking at one small animal, a two-inch tunicate salp, caught mid meal and probably close to the end of its life.

Salps get called sea squirts and they do look a bit like skinny jellyfish that forgot their tentacles, but they are not jellyfish at all. They belong to a group of animals that are oddly closer to humans than to jellies, because inside that gelatinous body there is a simple rod called a notochord that muscles can grab onto, a very bare-bones version of a spine.

Most of the time they just drift around as clear, barrel-shaped cylinders, pulsing through open water and minding their own business.

This particular salp floated in the Lembeh Strait of North Sulawesi, Indonesia, where underwater photographer Massimo Giorgetta spotted it on a dive.

He titled the image Protected Lives, and it later won a bronze award in the Nature/Underwater category at the Tokyo Foto Awards. It’s easy to see why!

The creature hovers there like a fragile little capsule in black water, freshly stuffed with life and strangely peaceful about it.

A tunicate salp floats through the Lembeh Strait, carrying an entire ecosystem within its transparent body.

Inside, tiny crabs, shrimps, and larval creatures drift in its gelatinous core, while a yellow boxfish hovers nearby.

In the vast darkness of the deep sea, this fragile traveler provides shelter in a world where survival is never guaranteed.

Because the salp is almost transparent, its body turns into a kind of glass display box. At first everything inside reads as a fuzzy blur, a pale cloud trapped in jelly. Then your eyes start to make sense of it. A yellow blob sharpens into a juvenile boxfish.

A few tiny crabs and shrimp larvae hang in place like they were paused mid-swim. The whole animal feels less like one creature and more like a busy neighborhood inside a ghost.

Salps usually eat simple phytoplankton, pumping seawater through a sticky inner net that catches whatever is small enough to fit. Giorgetta explains that this one had gone all in on the buffet, swallowing a young boxfish, very small flatworms, larval Squilla mantis, drifting heteropods, plus several little mysteries he could not even identify.

The result is a swimming smorgasbord wrapped in glassy flesh. It is a little cruel and strangely gorgeous at the same time, a reminder that the “empty” ocean is crowded with tiny lives, and that sometimes a single mouthful of sea carries an entire world inside it.

See more on Giorgetta’s website. Image © Massimo Giorgetta.