Siphonophores

I didn’t go down a rabbit hole but a jellyfish hole, a totally natural, normal segue in a conversation to suddenly want to learn everything I can about dangerous jellyfish. Does this happen to anyone else? You’re organizing your week, making breakfast or repairing a sock (I repair socks when it’s just a hole, but sometimes they are just too thin to save), and suddenly you want to know everything about the Portuguese man o’ war?

So they’re not technically jellyfish but something called a siphonophore (and here I’m looking at wikipedia) which means they are colonial organisms. They are made up of zooids and they work together to perform specific functions. There’s no “animal” called a Portuguese man o’ war but a colony of animals.

This reminded me of the fantastic Adrien Tchaikovsky book Alien Clay. The novel is about a penal colony planet where all the animals are siphonophores of each other. Need to breathe? Here’s an organism to process oxygen, or whatever gas they have on that planet. Need to move? What’ll do for you today, cilia? Stumps? Claws? Wings? The idea is a ton of fun.

So I look that up next to learn more about the writing of it and if Tchaikovsky was, possibly, inspired by the Portuguese man o’ war. He might have been, but it’s much more of a political satire (which is also what I liked about the novel), but the wiki site mentioned a Greg Egan novel called Morphotrophic and The Children Star by Joan Slonczewski that use the same concept. So great, more things to read (eye roll or happy face, depending on how stressed out I feel for needing time.) In looking at the reviews for both novels, I’m going to try to get a sample to look at first because they might be interesting as an idea but awful to read.

So three important things to know about the Portuguese man o’ war 1) they’re not jellyfish 2) leave them alone if you find one washed up on the shore; their stings can be painful even when they’re dead, and can even kill you if you find yourself wrapped up in one. Recommended is to put the area affected into hot water 3) they are prevalent in Australia, and have a tendency to bloom more and more with climate change.

And that brings me up out of the … jellyfish … hole