A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
siphonophore
A siphonophore is a colonial animal made of many specialized bodies working as one. Some parts swim, some catch prey, some digest, some reproduce, and none can survive alone, so the question of whether it is one animal or many has no clean answer. The Portuguese man o’ war is one. So is a filament of a species recorded off Western Australia at around 150 feet, among the longest animals ever measured.
Etymology
The word is Greek for tube-bearer, from the tubular structure connecting the members of the colony. The individual bodies are called zooids, and they develop by budding from a single fertilized egg, which means a siphonophore is genetically one individual that has grown into a cooperative crowd.
Notes
The by-the-wind sailor is a relative that floats at the surface, and the deep-sea siphonophores are among the most abundant predators in the ocean, hanging in the water column as a curtain of stinging tentacles many feet across and waiting. A great many produce light, and some use it as a lure, flicking a glowing tip to draw fish onto the tentacles.