Floating life.
In the spring and early summer the clear sea loch waters turn murky green, the result of millions of tiny floating plants and animals – plankton, many of them too small to see without a microscope. The tiny plants bloom in response to increased day length in spring and are food for hosts of tiny animals. Some of these animals live their whole lives in the plankton while others are the young stages of creatures which eventually settle on the seabed. The animals of the plankton can only float in the sunlit layers and are otherwise at the mercy of the wind and currents. The largest and most familiar animals in this plankton are the jellyfish. Sometimes in the summer vast numbers of jellyfish can be concentrated by winds blowing up a loch, and then become stranded at high tide.