It’s purple, it’s clear, it looks like a balloon, it’s painfully venomous, but it’s not a jellyfish and you wouldn’t have to convince me too hard that it’s from an alien world.
The Portuguese man o’ war is often mistaken as a jellyfish (because jellyfish look freaking crazy and we’re more understanding of crazy looking things like the man o’ war as long as they’re called jellyfish) but is actually a siphonophore.
Siphonophores are fascinating because they look like a single organism but they’re not, they’re actually a colonial organism made up of little individuals called zooids. Zooids are attached and dependent on each other so much that they can’t survive independently.
Via Sploid.
What an amazing creature
Wow. That is creepy.
It’s creepy enough on its own, and then when you consider it’s actually an amalgamated organism made up of multiple different organisms…even creepier.
I, for one, look forward to serving our Future Hyperdimensional Squid Overlords…