While we ponder the excellent selection of entries to the Supercapacitor Contest, it’s time that we do something far more important: look at pictures of baby animals. While we’re not Cute Overload, we do occasionally accumulate pictures of baby animals, and right now they’re burning holes in our proverbial pockets.

We might as well get this over with. Let’s start with the baby egrets:

Holy Toledo! These suckers are cute! Fuzzy little Great Egrets, hanging out in the palm trees. They’ve just got their first set of “real” feathers, and haven’t quite shaken off the down yet. Looks like they’re just learning to fly.

In contrast, here are some boring old (well actually cute and young) ducklings, with their guardian.

These aren’t ugly ducklings; they aren’t even ducklings at all. As you can see, these carefully herded youngsters will grow up to be Canada Geese.

Where do baby jellyfish come from? (Hint: If you’re a jellyfish, ask your parents.) Well, maybe we won’t answer that one in detail, but it is certainly the case that the life cycle of the jellyfish is slightly complicated. The jellyfish shape that we normally think of (the “medusa”) is the adult form. However, those medusas are most often serially produced by (and detach from) jelly polyps, which resemble sea anemones. I took this photo two tiny jelly polyps at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. They were attached to the side of a tank full of upside-down jellies. These are extremely small, and it’s only because of the “Super Macro” mode on my camera that I was able to get a good photo– they are each about half an inch across. It’s only coincidence that they appear to be hanging upside down– if the jellies were to detach now, they would end up right side up.