The swimming zooids don’t have a mouth, but the feeding zooids do, and they’re all connected to each other by a continuous gut. Normally the tentacles would be extended to catch food, and they can be very long (many meters). Looks like most of the tentacles are bunched up, maybe because the colony has been bumping along the muddy bottom. The furry part on the right has many units with long tentacles (hence the fuzziness) that feed. The long rod on the left that looks symmetrical has tiny tubular or cup-shaped zooids that resemble a swimming jellyfish, and these ‘swim’ while attached to the central rod to propel the colony through the water. But siphonophores can make several different kinds of basic units in the same colony. Lots of cnidarians can clone themselves this way to make copies of the basic unit or zooid – many sea anemones do this, it’s how corals make coral reefs. Not a symbiosis – the different parts of the colony all develop from one fertilized egg and are all genetically identical (same way your liver and your legs developed from the same fertilized egg and have the same genotype). And, as I always say, the deep sea is so remote, and individuals so sparsely distributed, that there are certainly tons of bizarre species down there that we don’t know a thing about. Creatures like this stretch the notion of what biologists consider an “individual.”Īt any rate, this siphonophore (if that’s what it is I doubt they captured it), is certainly a species new to science. ![]() ![]() Like the Man O’ War, this beast, spotted by a remote vehicle operating in the depths, is not really what we usually consider a “jellyfish,” as it’s colonial: the “individual” is really a colony of diverse and specialized individual cells (“ zooids“) that have become integrated into a miniature cooperating society. This form falls into the class Hydrozoa along with hydroids and colonial “jellyfish” like the Portuguese “Man O’ War” ( Physalia physalis). Siphonophores are in fact one form of what we normally called “jellyfish,” a group that actually comprises diverse creatures in the phylum Cnidaria. I originally made a typo in the title, calling this a “deep-see” creature, but in fact that’s what it is! The video and info comes from IFL Science!, and shows a bizarre deep-sea species of siphonophore.
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