Grasslands

And it's EVERYWHERE!

Documents, books, websites, even emails have AI summaries to it! And its so generic and brushed over, it barely says anything about the content at all!

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 :)

Besties

Those 3 friends weren't together like this, i collected each one from a different sample so i could take a picture of the 3 species of the same genus that occur here at the bay next to each other, for comparison.

Ah yeah i forgot to say, they are from the genus Tripos, that was previously Neoceratium (changed circa 2013), a group of marine dinoflagellates that was relatively recently separated from the Ceratium genus (division occurred circa 2010). Ceratium now only contains their freshwater cousins.

Bigger one is Tripos gravidus, tubular one is T. praelongus and the more alien-ish is the T. cephalotus.

I've seen many revisions that put T. praelongus as just a var. from T. gravidus, and many others that separate them in two species. Back when i was studying them, i based my research on the studies that consider them as two species of the same genus.

I haven't checked the news related to their taxonomy to see if it was decided for good how to classify those three cuties, but i know they already made a lot of scientists suffer and go back and forth on where to put these guys and their other cousins.