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Four Hidden Species of Portuguese Man-O'-War
- nugzbunny 2y agoI've been stung by one of these on my foot while surfing. It was painful. Painful enough for me to get out of the water and call it a day. The man in the photograph with his limb covered must have had an awful day.
- pvaldes 2y agoMore than a bad day. We should assume that those marks left permanent scars. I had spotted visible marks on a leg, five years after a mild encounter.
- smoyer 2y agoI was stung on the stomach and side ... It bent me over in the water then somehow I crawled up the beach and laid down.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoI was stung 25 years ago by a box jellyfish. The suicidal tendacies petered out after only 24 months.
- blacklion 2y agoExcuse 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?
- pvaldes 2y agoBox jellyfishes are on a different level. Jellyfish on steroids level of sting.
- blacklion 2y agoI know (fortunately from BBC documentaries and other sources, not from first-hand experience), but 24 months?
- andrewinardeer 2y agoThe pain of the sting made me want to kill myself to end it.
- hanszarkov 2y agoFascinating read. Never knew about these 'aggregate' organisms.
- pvaldes 2y agoI 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.
- oersted 2y agoWe 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.
- emmelaich 2y agoProbably the prevailing winds blow them in, and they never sink enough to catch the currents back out.
- lisper 2y ago> a single Portuguese man-o’-war is composed of four or five separate animals. Sorry, no. Just because they are not physically connected to each other doesn't make them separate animals. They are a single animal made of parts that happen not to be physically attached to one another. This is not uncommon in nature. Colony insects like ants and bees and termites are even more extreme examples of this. An individual ant (or bee or termite) is not an organism any more than (say) your spleen is. Most ants (or bees or termites) are sterile. They cannot reproduce. It is the colony that is the organism, not the individual insect.
- wasabi991011 2y agoI'm no expert but going off of Wikipedia, I don't see the issue with the passage you quoted? The nomenclature for colonial species seems to be that even if the colony can be a single organism, the parts are still referred to as animals (e.g. "A zooid is a single animal that is part of a colonial animal.") But anyway, is there even a strict definition for what an organism is?
- lisper 2y ago> is there even a strict definition for what an organism is? I don't know how "strict" it is but the dictionary definition of "organism" is "an individual form of life, such as a bacterium, protist, fungus, plant, or animal, composed of a single cell or a complex of cells in which organelles or organs work together to carry out the various processes of life." There is no requirement that it consist of parts that are physically connected to one another.
- bmitc 2y agoIt's a bit contrarian to make up your own taxonomy. No one calls a colony of ants, humans, bees, etc. a single animal. And in all of your examples, the separate animals are nearly clones of each other, anatomically speaking. That isn't the case with the man o'war.
- lisper 2y ago
- pedalpete 2y agoThese 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.
- richardw 2y agoGoogling produces: “ 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=Bluebottles%20are%20similar%20to%20the,to%20cause%20any%20human%20fatalities 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.
- teruakohatu 2y agoIts now widely accepted there is only one species: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421559 I grew up in New Zealand thinking blue bottles and man-o-war's were different.
- richardw 2y agoAh, missed that. New info, thank you!
- pvaldes 2y agoMy 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.
- pedalpete 2y agoNo, definitely not blue bottons, bluebottles have the distinctive "sail" that sits above the water.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoIn 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.
- teruakohatu 2y ago> 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war [2] https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/summertime-blues/ https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/summertime-blues/ [3] https://noc.ac.uk/news/memoriam-philip-roy-pugh https://noc.ac.uk/news/memoriam-philip-roy-pugh
- ivanbakel 2y ago> 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.
- Myrmornis 2y agoSufficient 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)
- Perenti 2y agoI feel doubtful about this article. They claim that the man-o-war is the largest colonial organisms, but there are HUGE siphonophores that are 100m long.
- jdlshore 2y agoIt says there are larger ones, but this is the largest that has differentiated roles.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI'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 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...
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago>> But they don’t have sex in any way we’d recognize. Small blessings.