At first glance, it looks like an alien eye—a gorgeous blue iris around a carmel-colored pupil, thick eyelashes radiating out like sun rays. The reddish/orange center looks a bit like the Eye of Sauron, but we aren’t in Mordor. We’re on the surface of the ocean, where a mysterious jellyfish relative is floating along, snacking on zooplankton.
Meet the blue button jelly (Porpita porpita). It’s a cnidarian (a group of mainly marine invertebrates, like corals, jellyfish, and Portuguese man-of-war), grows to be around an inch wide, and calls l many tropical and subtropical oceans home. The funky little creature consists of a float—the round part featured in the photograph—and a number of tentacles, some of which have stinging cells.
So far, so good. Researchers believe it’s a “quasi colonial organism,” Larry Madin, a jelly expert at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, tells Popular Science.
“It’s considered sort of a colony because there are tentacles that some of them are for catching food, they have stinging cells on them. Some of them are defensive tentacles to sort of attack things that might attack this, and then it also has some reproductive structures that are suspended from the bottom of this float,” he explains.
But the situation is far from certain.
“People have been confused for a long time about is it really a colonial animal, you know, like a coral is, or is it just a single animal that has all these multiple parts?” Madin says.
Blue button jellies appear to grow from a single larva that eventually changes into an adult. Unlike the Portuguese man-of-war, which have a number of parts that catch and digest food, the enigmatic blue button jellies secure prey with many tentacles and digest it in a central stomach area.
On the topic of food, they themselves are also prey. One of their predators is a swimming snail called Glaucus, that looks like it popped straight out of a fantasy world, too (Avatar’s Pandora, specifically). Rather appropriately, it’s also known as the blue dragon.
It remains to be seen if or when the blue button jelly’s status as a quasi colonial organism will be clarified. In the meantime, just keep floating…just keep floating…just keep floating, floating, floating.
The post Perplexing blue button jelly looks like something out of ‘Lord of the Rings’ appeared first on Popular Science.