As part of the international Ningaloo Canyons expedition, a team of researchers from the Museum of Western Australia, the Schmidt Ocean Institute and the Scripps Oceanography Institute unexpectedly encountered a rare creature known as the siphonophore. However, the size of this creature turned out to be, to put it mildly, frightening.
Scientists have explored an under-explored but biologically rich ocean off the coast of Western Australia using ROVs and sonar. On the way back to their expedition, the researcher managed to see a certain creature:
“We were all amazed when we saw this,” said biologists Nerida Wilson and Lisa Kirkendale of the Museum of Western Australia. “People were very excited, they came to the control room from all over the ship.”
'We've seen siphonophores before, but this one was both large and unusual. Despite the fact that ROV submersibles made an estimate of its length, it remained officially unmeasured. It looks like this creature is longer than any other animal on the planet. '
The creature's outer ring was estimated to be approximately 47 meters long. All of it consisted, in turn, of tiny individuals called zooids. They clone themselves thousands of times into one of two forms – some are formed with stinging tentacles and even red baits to attract food, others specialize in reproduction or locomotion. All of them perform the function of organs in the huge body of the siphonophore.
“It all looks like one extremely high-level animal, whose activities are shaped by thousands of other individuals,” said marine biologist Stephan Siebert of Brown University.
