Photo: Moonjellies in the water in Weinberg Inlet, Campania Island.

We wound our way through a labyrinth of rocky passages lined with short scrubby cedars and bald rocks to anchor in Weinberg Inlet at the end of Dunn Passage on Campania Island on British Columbia’s outer channels. From the bow where he was dropping the anchor, Steve called, “jellyfish, hundreds of them!”

When the anchor was set, I looked over the side. Sure enough, the water, tinted with tannin from land runoff, was full of the nearly colorless jellyfish of the kind known as moonjellies. There were so many and they were packed so close that some were tangled in the tentacles of others.

That was the first time we saw swarms of moonjellies on this trip. Later we saw them from the dock of the Hakai Research Institute and swarming aroud us in False Bay on Lasqueti Island in Georgia Strait. The biggest were the ones at Hakai, some must have been almost two feet across.

Making an educated guess, I attribute their numbers to the sunny warm summer British Columbia has experienced. The sunshine causes phytoplankton blooms, which in turn causes the growth of zooplankton, food for moonjellies.