You know how they’re colonial organisms? My whole life I thought that meant “they’re made out of thousands of almost microscopic little guys”. You know, like every other colonial organism.
Turns out that’s not true.
They’re made of four guys.
One guy’s the tentacles, one guy’s the stomach, one guy’s the gonads, and one guy’s the funny balloon sail.
here are their weird babies:
you can really see the multiple polyps/medusae
imagine being the gonads
imagine NOT being the gonads
To be fair it’s not four guys period but four types of guy; EVERY tentacle is a guy! A guy who’s just one tentacle!!
To answer the common question of “what does that even mean?” and “how?”, all the members of the colony grow from the same embryo as clones.
So imagine if you were born as just a head, but with a twin sibling who was just a torso, and another sibling who was an arm, and another who was the heart, and so forth, all stuck together to function as a person.
You might be saying “that just sounds like a regular person, how is a Man O’ War different then, where do we draw the line between a body organ and a member of a colony???”
I’m gonna let the Octopus Lady answer those questions, even though attempting to answer them apparently drove her insane, and in fact she does not reach an answer that even she finds fully satisfying as a professional biologist, but you’ll still learn lots and lots of neat facts!
i’m envisioning something like this:
You wanna get really fucky?
The mitochondria used to be a separate organism from your cells entirely. It’s actually a type of bacteria, and it has its own DNA.
Every single one of your cells is a weird bacteria/eukaryote symbiote.
And forget being in the same phylum. They aren’t even in the same kingdom. They aren’t even in the same domain
Reblogging again for that great character design
And also yeah at the cellular level we’re all “colonies!”
As the octopus lady mentions one reason a man o war’s zooid counts as a creature in a colony and not an organ is just that if you cut it off the rest, it can still sense the world around it and move and act, only dying later of starvation, whereas your lungs or heart will start dying instantly. If your lungs, removed from your body, could still sense something and move toward it then they might count as their own polyp in your colony. Plus all the polyps in a siphonophore start as their own embryos, and still have some body parts of their own that aren’t other guys!
I mean, it’s all arbitrary. There is no naturally existing distinction between these things, we are just a species that’s kind of obsessive about sorting and categorizing things, even if we have to make up the categories whole cloth. In a very real sense, every organic molecule is just a part of one very complex physics equation that’s been playing out for some 3.7 billion years, and any other explanation is just some amount of simplification
No aspect of biology is completely binary. Everything is a gradient.
As another example, there was no “first man”. There is no point where something is human but its mother is not.
Another really cool example is the “ring species”— where population A can make fertile offspring with population B, and population B can make fertile offspring with population C, but A and C can’t make fertile offspring together.
Are they all the same species? Any way you try to cut it, it’ll break the classical definition of a species.
(And, of course, it’s more complicated in real life)
If some disaster happened and wiped out all populations except for “red” and “purple” (who exist in the same space but can’t breed), we would call them different species.
But as it stands, genes from red can and do flow over to purple; it just has to go down the chain to do so.
