In the summer months, north-easterly winds frequently herald the arrival of bluebottles on beaches along Australia’s east coast. But while bluebottles – or to give them their more formal name, the Pacific man-of-war – are a common sight on Australian shores, they are not native to coastal waters. Instead, they spend most of their lives on the open ocean, drifting with the winds and the currents. Bluebottles are just one of a collection of organisms that have made their home at the ocean’s surface. Some of these animals are hydrozoans like the bluebottle. There is the by-the-wind sailor, Velella velella, which has a stiff, transparent, oval sail about five centimetres long attached to its bright blue float, and Porpita porpita, sometimes known as the blue button, which is shaped like a disc about three centimetres in diameter surrounded by stinging polyps. But there is also the strikingly beautiful sea dragon; crustaceans such as shrimp, buoy barnacles and tiny swimming copepods; and even molluscs such as the violet snail and Recluzia. Known collectively as the neuston, these creatures are not tied to any one place. Instead, they move with the wind and the water. Sometimes they gather into huge drifts, living islands of velella and bluebottles like those that wash occasionally ashore on beaches in Australia or the western coast of the Canada and the United States. At other times they clump together around drifting debris or spread out sparsely over hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres. Despite its ubiquity, the neuston remains comparatively poorly understood and critically understudied. A mere handful of papers concerning the ecosystem are published each year, and only three of the 400 proposals received for the International Zooplankton Production Symposium earlier this year concerned the neuston. Marine ecologist Associate Prof Kerrie Swadling,from the University of Tasmania, puts it bluntly. “We know more about deep sea vents than we know about the neuston.” The reasons for this ignorance are partly historical. Although several important studies of the neuston were published during the 20th century, they were written in Russian by scientists from the Soviet Union and were largely ignored outside the Eastern Bloc. But for the most part, the lack of research into the neuston is a consequence of the practical challenges involved in observing organisms that are scattered unevenly across the immensity of the open ocean. Griffith University’s Prof Kylie Pitt specialises in jellyfish ecology. She says, “The neuston’s transient nature makes it difficult to study. You’ll see large numbers of jellyfish or bluebottles and then you won’t be able to find them again.” In recent years, however, there has been an uptick in interest in the neuston. New research is revealing not just its importance to the health of ocean ecosystems as disparate as coral reefs and the deep ocean, but also important gaps in our understanding of how it will be affected by changes in the ocean environment. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup