In South Florida these would be so abundant some years that they would wash ashore and dry up in the sun, the roasted tentacles forming a continuous brown strip for miles, mixed with smaller amounts of seaweed at the high tide point.
Punctuated every few feet by the intact blue balloons, which were fun for kids to step on and pop harmlessly once the dead tentacles had decayed like that.
Even then there were usually only a few floating around when you were out swimming in the Atlantic. It was not too difficult to avoid them, but occasionally you could get a small string of welts anyway, more likely from detached tentacles than direct contact with one.
But if the ocean got rough when there were significant numbers close to shore, the tentacles would break up into a million pieces and you couldn't swim without tiny little stings like pin-pricks all the time.
These are called blue bottles in Australia, and we get them fairly regularly where I live (Bondi) but also up and down the east coast. I'm sure they are on the west coast as well.
I had thought they were 3 distinct parts, not 5. It is a fascinating bit of symbiosis.
“ Bluebottles are similar to the Portuguese Man o’ War (Physalia physalis) in appearance and behavior, but are smaller and less venomous. And unlike the Portuguese Man o’ War, bluebottle stings have yet to cause any human fatalities.”
But the bluebottle seems to be called the “pacific man-o ‘war”, thus some potential for mixing them up, or adding another subspecies, etc. Not an expert.
My guess is that they are confusing blue bottles with blue bottons (Porpita porpita). The floating ones comprise Physalia, Velella and Porpita. Is an oceanic trilogy.
In my youth, we would often take long’ish car rides to get to our favorite beaches. One of them - Bunker Bay Beach, right on the Western-most tip of the country, was a particular treasure as - at the time in the late 70’s/early 80’s, it was somewhat difficult to get to, involving a bit of bush bashing and whatnot.
44C, a stinking hot day, and we’d been driving for what seemed like hours to get there, my sister and I basically boiling in the back seat while Dad navigated the dusty road.
We arrive at this beautiful beach (it’s truly a gem) and I open the car door and run like mad to get into the pristine, blue waters, levitating on the baking hot sand, ignoring all and sundry in my rush to cool down. My Dad yelling something in the background did not deter me, nor did the pleas of my sister.
I dove into the waves and was instantly greeted with a hard, rushing white noise of pain. It was literally like someone had glued an untuned TV set to my eyeballs, just white noise and pain like nothing I’d ever experienced.
I blacked out. The next thing I remember is being rolled around in the scorching sand, my torso covered in blue bottle tentacles, the scars of which I still bear, almost 50 years later. My Dad, screaming at me to breathe, my sister yelling at me to read the signs: “BLUE BOTTLE SWARM IN SEASON: NO SWIMMING!”
What had been a joy turned into misery, as we now needed to get back in the car and battle the dust to take me to a hospital and make sure Dad and I were okay - he’d been covered in the tentacles too, as he ripped them off my skin and rolled me in the sand.
Subsequent visits to that beautiful spot were always tempered with at least 10 or 15 minutes of observation and surveillance, and for sure I never ran like that to get into those beautiful waters quite the same again .. and I subsequently learned that Bunker Bay Beach was kind of the final destination for every bluebottle that ever got caught in the winds along the Western Australian coastline, sort of a catchment of misery on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world ..
You sort of summarized my experience with Australia as an European - beautiful to stunning places all around the coast, and every single one with massive sign of all the deadly creatures and other dangers that can kill ya in a minute (ie Irukandji). Didn't even take a proper swim there in the ocean, just waist deep on more remote beaches.
Then I saw on Fraser island on some lookout above the shore sea literally swarming with sharks. From time to time some giant stingray swam through them, but mostly sharks. Like some caricature movie with Bond and piranhas.
Oh boy do I enjoy swimming in Mediterranean and just not giving a fuck about anything, anytime, day or night, any season, even butt naked. In decades of going there I got 1 sting from small jellyfish on the shoulder, that's it.
> And, lo and behold: they found that there were actually five species of Physalia
I am not sure there are different species, Wikipedia says one species and mentioned at some point some thought there might be more than one. [1]
An article published in New Zealand Geographic in 2002 [2] mentions multiple species a number of times but also states that Marine Biologist and taxonomist Emeritus Professor Philip Roy Pugh (RIP 2021) does not agree:
> Phil Pugh, an English expert on world siphonophore jellies (of which the bluebottle is one), thinks not. He believes there is only a single worldwide bluebottle species, Physalia physalis, but that it varies greatly in size.
Philip Pugh described a quarter of all known siphonophores [3], more than any one person. So he probably knew what he was talking about.
There is a tendency in certain areas of biology to attribute extremely minor regional variation to new species.
> There is a tendency in certain areas of biology to attribute extremely minor regional variation to new species.
The article describes pretty much the opposite of this, though - the species found have no regional variation, and even overlap majorly.
If the scientists involved in the paper cited by TFA have really found a large level of genetic diversity, I don’t see the point of arguing against their definition of species. It’s not a two way street, but sufficient genetic separation is enough to establish separate species, even ones indistinguishable to human eyes.
Sufficient genetic separation in the presence of range overlap. Otherwise you're just arguing about whether things are geographical races vs species, which can only be subjective. (Mayr and Haffer had it right)
Excuse me of my question is unpleasant for you, but why do you have suicidal tendencies for 2 years? Is it objective property of box jellyfish venom (like some medicine can induce suicidal thoughts) or it is because it was painful for whole 24 months?
We get lots of these in the Bay of Biscay for some reason. Not really warm waters, it's the North-is Atlantic. I guess it's mild in summer, that's when we get them.
I personally prefer the pet version called little sail (Velella velella). Supercute floating city and harmless to touch (I had put them in my hands). Its predator, the blue sea dragon definitely can sting. It eats blue bottles and store the poison cells as weapon, so if you don't look out, you could get more than you expect.
Those blue dragons and the deep sea Siphonophores (with cool floaters shaped like cut crystal spaceships) are among the most alien things in this planet. I don't even want to imagine how much more poisonous than blue bottles could be those deep sea species in its habitat.
I bet that NASA researchers salivate about the idea of how much similar things could live in Europe's ocean waiting to be discovered.
I'm reminded of moss sex which is sort of like if your sperm or eggs went off and got a job an an apartment and a social life and only bothered to spin up a full-blown human being for sexy times. Both forms being multicellular and alternating (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternation_of_generations).
I guess that's a bit like the caterpillar and the butterfly, though I think they have the same ploidy.
Except for Portuguese Man-O-War, it's not an alternation but the multiple forms all existing at once. Still pretty weird but I think there's actually more precedent for this kind of thing than initially comes to mind: switch/case blocks really high up in the genomic call stack.
I'm a bit disappointed to learn that these "separate" animals are genetically identical. When I first heard this described I thought it was like lichen where cells from multiple kingdoms are each reproducing in tandem and forming structures that neither could make happen independently: Like if your gut biome moved out and figured out how to bootstrap enough of a body to get its own job and apartment and...
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Punctuated every few feet by the intact blue balloons, which were fun for kids to step on and pop harmlessly once the dead tentacles had decayed like that.
Even then there were usually only a few floating around when you were out swimming in the Atlantic. It was not too difficult to avoid them, but occasionally you could get a small string of welts anyway, more likely from detached tentacles than direct contact with one.
But if the ocean got rough when there were significant numbers close to shore, the tentacles would break up into a million pieces and you couldn't swim without tiny little stings like pin-pricks all the time.
I had thought they were 3 distinct parts, not 5. It is a fascinating bit of symbiosis.
“ Bluebottles are similar to the Portuguese Man o’ War (Physalia physalis) in appearance and behavior, but are smaller and less venomous. And unlike the Portuguese Man o’ War, bluebottle stings have yet to cause any human fatalities.”
https://oceana.org/marine-life/bluebottle/#:~:text=Bluebottl....
But the bluebottle seems to be called the “pacific man-o ‘war”, thus some potential for mixing them up, or adding another subspecies, etc. Not an expert.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421559
I grew up in New Zealand thinking blue bottles and man-o-war's were different.
In my youth, we would often take long’ish car rides to get to our favorite beaches. One of them - Bunker Bay Beach, right on the Western-most tip of the country, was a particular treasure as - at the time in the late 70’s/early 80’s, it was somewhat difficult to get to, involving a bit of bush bashing and whatnot.
44C, a stinking hot day, and we’d been driving for what seemed like hours to get there, my sister and I basically boiling in the back seat while Dad navigated the dusty road.
We arrive at this beautiful beach (it’s truly a gem) and I open the car door and run like mad to get into the pristine, blue waters, levitating on the baking hot sand, ignoring all and sundry in my rush to cool down. My Dad yelling something in the background did not deter me, nor did the pleas of my sister.
I dove into the waves and was instantly greeted with a hard, rushing white noise of pain. It was literally like someone had glued an untuned TV set to my eyeballs, just white noise and pain like nothing I’d ever experienced.
I blacked out. The next thing I remember is being rolled around in the scorching sand, my torso covered in blue bottle tentacles, the scars of which I still bear, almost 50 years later. My Dad, screaming at me to breathe, my sister yelling at me to read the signs: “BLUE BOTTLE SWARM IN SEASON: NO SWIMMING!”
What had been a joy turned into misery, as we now needed to get back in the car and battle the dust to take me to a hospital and make sure Dad and I were okay - he’d been covered in the tentacles too, as he ripped them off my skin and rolled me in the sand.
Subsequent visits to that beautiful spot were always tempered with at least 10 or 15 minutes of observation and surveillance, and for sure I never ran like that to get into those beautiful waters quite the same again .. and I subsequently learned that Bunker Bay Beach was kind of the final destination for every bluebottle that ever got caught in the winds along the Western Australian coastline, sort of a catchment of misery on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world ..
Then I saw on Fraser island on some lookout above the shore sea literally swarming with sharks. From time to time some giant stingray swam through them, but mostly sharks. Like some caricature movie with Bond and piranhas.
Oh boy do I enjoy swimming in Mediterranean and just not giving a fuck about anything, anytime, day or night, any season, even butt naked. In decades of going there I got 1 sting from small jellyfish on the shoulder, that's it.
I got caught in a blue bottle swarm about 10 years ago off Mark's Park in Bondi, but the marks only lasted a week.
I am not sure there are different species, Wikipedia says one species and mentioned at some point some thought there might be more than one. [1]
An article published in New Zealand Geographic in 2002 [2] mentions multiple species a number of times but also states that Marine Biologist and taxonomist Emeritus Professor Philip Roy Pugh (RIP 2021) does not agree:
> Phil Pugh, an English expert on world siphonophore jellies (of which the bluebottle is one), thinks not. He believes there is only a single worldwide bluebottle species, Physalia physalis, but that it varies greatly in size.
Philip Pugh described a quarter of all known siphonophores [3], more than any one person. So he probably knew what he was talking about.
There is a tendency in certain areas of biology to attribute extremely minor regional variation to new species.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war
[2] https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/summertime-blues/
[3] https://noc.ac.uk/news/memoriam-philip-roy-pugh
The article describes pretty much the opposite of this, though - the species found have no regional variation, and even overlap majorly.
If the scientists involved in the paper cited by TFA have really found a large level of genetic diversity, I don’t see the point of arguing against their definition of species. It’s not a two way street, but sufficient genetic separation is enough to establish separate species, even ones indistinguishable to human eyes.
The man in the photograph with his limb covered must have had an awful day.
The suicidal tendacies petered out after only 24 months.
I had spotted visible marks on a leg, five years after a mild encounter.
Those blue dragons and the deep sea Siphonophores (with cool floaters shaped like cut crystal spaceships) are among the most alien things in this planet. I don't even want to imagine how much more poisonous than blue bottles could be those deep sea species in its habitat.
I bet that NASA researchers salivate about the idea of how much similar things could live in Europe's ocean waiting to be discovered.
I guess that's a bit like the caterpillar and the butterfly, though I think they have the same ploidy.
Except for Portuguese Man-O-War, it's not an alternation but the multiple forms all existing at once. Still pretty weird but I think there's actually more precedent for this kind of thing than initially comes to mind: switch/case blocks really high up in the genomic call stack.
I'm a bit disappointed to learn that these "separate" animals are genetically identical. When I first heard this described I thought it was like lichen where cells from multiple kingdoms are each reproducing in tandem and forming structures that neither could make happen independently: Like if your gut biome moved out and figured out how to bootstrap enough of a body to get its own job and apartment and...
Small blessings.