Délia ☾

Postcards from Yellowstone

But ye lions do this once cubs each a certain age. A decent amount of birds do it (for example: flamingos and a lot of penguin, duck, and goose species). Gharials (a type of South Asian crocodilian) form creches with hundreds of babies from multiple nests (they lay under 100 eggs each and sometimes as few as 20). Feral hogs tend to form groups of mothers and young like this, and I saw 3 sows and like 15+ tiny babies the other day and they were so cute

But ye that's how you get pictures like these

That chart only shows the variety of life cycles among the ones we call jellyfish :) there is so much more the other cnidarians can do :)

Anemones: mostly sessile, some can detach and swim away by wiggling their bodies like worms by brief periods, and then retach. They have roughly 4 options of life cycles, with a lot of variation among the species.

Coral: oh boy these are fun! They have 3 to 4 different paths with a lot of variation among the species. They are sessile colonies, that somehow developed something in the likes of an endoskeleton, and they are simbionts to zooxantelas, which allows them a life quite close to photosynthetic organisms.

And don't get me started on Man'o wars! These things? A colony. Not one organism, many organisms wildly different from one another, attached in a simbiotic way, and not sessile! You know how weird it is for a colony to not be sessile? And you know how weird it is for a colony to have organisms this different from one another? Yeah, man'o wars are weird. And in that weirdness, they also have one of the strongest toxins among the cnidarians. And that life cycle? Wild.

I could keep talking about the less well known cnidarians as well, and even discuss the deep sea weirdos, but i think all this is enough to show that...

Cnidarians can do so, so much more :)

Diatoms

And an intruder there in the corner