Like a champion sports team, some creatures really are greater than the sum of their parts. Known as colonial organisms, these bizarre beings appear to be a single, bounded organism – but are in fact assemblages of many tiny individuals all working together for a common cause. Weirdly enough, many of these conglomerates are also highly venomous.
The Portuguese man o’ war’s reputation as one of the world’s most feared jellyfish is a complete myth – because it isn’t a jellyfish at all. It’s actually a siphonophore, which means it’s a colony of millions of identical clones called zooids.
Despite being separate individuals, these zooids can’t survive on their own and need to group together to form an enormous aggregate. Once in formation as a unified Portuguese man o’ war, these zooids specialize so that each performs a specific function that helps the colony to thrive.
For instance, some zooids enable the creature to swim, while others form the organism’s notoriously long tentacles, which are loaded with venom-filled nematocysts.
Coral
Some corals are hard and some are soft, but all are colonies of polyps.
Image credit: QUI NGUYEN/Unsplash.com
They may not be mobile (with some exceptions), but corals have a lot in common with the Portuguese man o’ war. Most significantly, they too are colonial animals and are composed of large numbers of tiny creatures called polyps.
Each individual polyp needs to eat, and therefore has its own mouth. In many cases, these openings are surrounded by small tentacles sporting nematocysts, which are used to paralyze and kill the coral’s prey.
The Long Stringy Stingy Thingy
You can see where the name comes from.
Back to siphonophores we go. As it happens, the Portuguese man o’ war is far from unique, as there are around 175 species of these zooid gatherings lurking in the ocean. Perhaps the most impressive is Apolemia uvaria, more commonly known as the long stringy stingy thingy.
The longest and stingiest of these thingies was sighted off the coast of Australia in 2020, and is estimated to have measured some 120 meters (393 feet) from end to end. Despite this incredible length, though, the creature’s lack of girth means that it’s still nowhere near as large as the blue whale, and poses no threat to the baleen whale’s title of the world’s biggest animal.
Moss Animals
Bryozoans may look otherworldly, but they’re pretty common.
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Reports of weird, alien-like blobs appearing all over North America briefly caused a panic back in 2024, although the wobbly balloon-like critters turned out to be harmless bryozoans. Also known as moss animals, these specimens consist of huge numbers of zooids all working together, with groups of colonies forming a delicate structure known as a thicket.
Among the various types of zooid found in bryozoans are avicularia, which are specialized for defense and use their beak-shaped tips to peck away at invaders and assailants.
Yet another siphonophore was discovered in the deep ocean back in 2005. Lurking at depths of between 1,600 and 2,300 (5,250 to 7,550 feet), this member of the Erenna genus was particularly unique in that it was the first marine invertebrate ever found to make use of red fluorescence to attract prey.
While blue and green bioluminescence are common in the ocean, red is pretty uncommon as the long wavelength of this color of light doesn’t travel very far in the depths. It was therefore believed that most animals living far below the surface lacked the ability to see red light, yet the discovery of this unusual siphonophore changed that assumption.
