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.
I've been taking an annual fishing pilgrimage to Fraser Island for over a decade, maybe two now. Took my skin diving gear to catch some lobster one year, but it was too rough to see much. Just before we went the next year a skin diver got eaten by a shark off Indian head. Skin diving gear has remained home ever since.
A few years later I spent a couple of weeks camping and fishing at Teewah Beach. Loverly spot, not too difficult to get to. A stag party group moved in beside us on the beach, which I wasn't too happy about. That night there was a bit of loud fun emanating from them, but not as bad as I thought it might be. Driving back the next day, we saw the group sitting on a log. No yahoo'ing now, they looked morose. Turned out a couple of them how drowned a few hours earlier trying to rescue a boy in the surf. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-06/teewah-two-men-drowne...
Personally I don't regard Australia as particularly dangerous. I've been more scared in Switzerland climbing an ice pathway to a pub just meters are a 100m cliff, slipping and the only thing preventing me from certain death was a rope I was holding onto with all my might. I thought the setup was nuts, but the locals didn't seem is the slightest bit fazed by it. But I guess it's what your familiar with. My mother ensured I was swimming in the surf not long after I could walk, and the Swiss haven been climbing icy paths not log after they got out of nappies. Australia is a safe place if you are Australian, and Switzerland is safe if you are Swiss.
I wouldn’t be comfortable with the dangerous delights of Australia if I hadn’t grown up there, learned to spot the dugites and the tigers, been swarmed by ants while having a piss in the spinifex, gotten the odd toe stuck in a blue tongue, had jars of Christmas spiders for pets, acquired the requisite taste for a widgidi grub, discovered the reason you never kill the huntsmen, found much delight and mirth in tempting the rock pool blue rings out of their holes with a coin or two, swam beyond the reef only to be stalked back to shore by a tiger, survived the odd bushfire, beating back the flames with a damp potato bag… if my old Poppa hadn’t taught me how to deploy the hairspray and cigarette lighter installed permanently in the dunny, against the ever-present red back.. all before my teenage years brought me to the safety of the upper hemisphere.
Living in the vicinity of the Austrian alps now, in my older age, like you I’m also a lot more terrified of those slippery mountain paths, but more so of the complacency and dullness that a Swiss life can bring ..
I too enjoy the Med, or more particularly parts of the Adriatic, but I can’t swim there much without getting the shark senses tweaked, no matter how hard some local tells me there aren’t sharks worthy of my worries to be found.
It’s a bit like the difference between a good solid few weeks out bush, and a walk in the tempered gardens of some monarch.
Well, now I have kids so that's good enough reason for me :)
Its true that on my past travels to south east asia I couldn't care less about any of this. But still Australia felt more dangerous than say Borneo or Palawan on Philippines, I've only saw (small) sharks when diving enough, basically 0 jellyfish.
To be honest I might’ve wished for a few sharks to show up during my kids swims on our Croatia trips, or at least something with a bit of bite… only to give them the spark that their Australian genes hadn’t quite ignited, to be sure.
Indonesia and the western pacific in general doesn’t get enough fear, imho. Those sea snakes man…
Thanks, I always get a bit flowery when I remember my youth in Australia.
Yeah, the bluebottles on the west coast have a bit more bite to them than the ones in Bondi, I think. It might also have something to do with me having been baked in the oven of the beach sands that day, as Dad fought to get me removed from the tangled sticky mess, which had covered most of my torso. It was a scorcher.
> 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...
I 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.
> 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.
It'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.
"How this happens: when a Physalia egg is fertilized, it starts dividing, like every other fertilized egg. But pretty quickly it breaks apart into two and then more distinct embryos — genetically identical, but physically separate."
Sorry, I saw "clone" and thought you were talking about genetics. But you're wrong about anatomy too. There is a lot of variation in morphology between different insect types in a colony.
>> There is a lot of variation in morphology between different insect types in a colony
Bees in a hive change their role (e.g. nursery, house-keeping, defence, food gathering) depending on their age but all these roles have the same morphology, unlike castes in ants.
I'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?
> 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.
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.