A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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by-the-wind sailor
Velella velella, a small blue oval float a few centimeters across, carrying a stiff transparent sail set diagonally across its deck, with short tentacles hanging beneath. It lives at the surface of the open ocean, cannot swim, and goes where the wind takes it — at an angle, not straight downwind, because of the set of the sail. It travels in rafts of thousands, and when the wind turns onshore they come ashore in windrows of blue.
Etymology
The English name is a sailor’s description of a fellow sailor, and the Latin says the same: velella is a diminutive of vēlum, a sail or a covering, the root behind veil and behind the velum in your own soft palate. Linnaeus named it in 1758 and used the same word twice, which is his way of saying that the sail is the whole animal. Older English has it as Jack-sail-by-the-wind and as the sallee man. Italian calls it la barchetta di San Pietro, Saint Peter’s little boat.
Notes
The sail is set either left or right of the long axis, fixed early in development, and the two forms sail at opposite angles to the wind. A Soviet scientist, A.I. Savilov, proposed in 1958 that this is one species sorting itself geographically — that the prevailing winds of each ocean basin deliver left-handed and right-handed individuals to different places. It belongs to the pleuston, from Greek pleusis, sailing: the community that lives in the film where air meets water.