According to New Scientist, creatures like corals and jellyfish are included in siphonophores.
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The fans of the famous atheist Richard Dawkins are surely acquainted to the “flying spaghetti monster”, which is a term that was first devised by Bobby Henderson in his open letter to the Kansas School Board.
Unable to identify the unusual life form, the petroleum workers jokingly named the creature after the deity recognized by adherents of Pastafarianism, a religion that worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It has been reported that a deep-sea creature has been spotted off the coast of Angola.
And each zooid has a job to do.
The creature is colored white and seems very weird. It is actually a symbiotic colony of several organisms, sometimes thousands of them, and the colonies can grow to be the longest animals in the sea.
The species nicknamed “flying spaghetti monster”, was identified as a siphonophorae by researchers Daniel Jones and colleague Phil Pugh who specialize in deep-sea ecology at the National Oceanography Centre in the United Kingdom Jones is involved with the SERPENT Project, a collaboration between researchers and ROV teams from oil and gas companies to document ocean life. One zooid, developed from a fertilized egg, starts the process, and then other zooids bud from the original zooid until a whole animal is formed, according to the siphonophore website. Only some can eat and only some can reproduce. Cystonectae are relatively rare and have two main parts.
What you identify in the image as the big blob, is nothing more than a gas-filled float, dubbed pneumatophore. (That’s the bulbous-looking thing sticking out from the top part of the spaghetti monster.) Farther down the stem is a siphosome, where a bunch of zooids are hard at work catching and eating food, reproducing, and doing all the other things the animal needs to do to survive. It seems that B. conifer lacks a third part of the body dubbed nectosome which would comprise zooids responsible for motility.
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Those armlike appendages poking through B. conifer’s mass of “spaghetti” are gastrozooids, or feeding polyps, that the creature uses to catch food, Munro said. Some species are the largest animals in the world and can be as long as 40 meters.
