#pyrosomes

📹 Robert Stansfield

"Pyrosomes are brilliant. Some people call them sea Pickles."

These are salps btw!

Phylum Chordata (aka the phylum with VERTEBRATES... disgusting), class Thaliacea, Order Salpida

They can come in a few shapes and sizes but these are colonial creatures (similar to Siphonophores like the Man whore but each individual is actually an individual, not a poorly defined organ/organism zooid)

They filter feed and are very silly. Chains can be longer than a blue whale because of course they are.

Anyways my hatred for them is mostly silly and mean spirited but if I'm going to be known for anything in the jelly community or jellyfish fandom, it's going to be my comical hatred of salps. And maybe comb jellyfish (beroe comb jellies scare me haha)

Btw, these are Pyrosomes (also known as fire bodies):

Same class, just in Order Pyrosomatida

They have a lovely bluish-green light display very characteristic of bioluminescent organisms and are very bright (just like the Periphylla jellyfish!)

Here's the image shown in Lisa Ann Gershwin's book! It's very pretty

When the photographer isn't making an effort to make them look pretty, I think they actually look kind of stupid, haha. But isn't that the appeal of jellyfish? To look stupid?

5. phyllosoma! these guys are just larval stages of spiny lobsters but ive seen these irl and theyre So flat its fucked. marine larval stages as a whole get a shoutout, its rly interesting how lots of sea creatures body plans change so much that they fill completely different ecological niches throughout their lives

4. chaetognaths :) arrow worms :) [is so small that water is viscous to me and i have to shoot myself like a bow and arrow through the water to catch prey]

3. cliones! got to meet these guys in july and theyre so enchanting. eating you

2. pyrosomes! i heart colonial tunicates

stygiomedusa gigantea my BELOVEDDDDDDDDDDD. seen here with her best friend of all time a cusk eel :)))

In a Pickle

In 1849 a surgeon on the HMS Rattlesnake spotted “miniature pillars of fire gleaming out of the sea”. Named ‘pyrosomes’ by scientists (and also known as ‘sea pickles’), the secret of their blue fire was a long-standing mystery. Researchers now think genes similar to those of other bioluminescent creatures are at play, suggesting common ancestors, yet sea pickles have more genes in common with fellow chordates like humans. Stranger still, sea pickles both produce and respond to light – similar to how some fish use fluorescence to warn of danger. All of this puts the sea pickle between interesting branches of the evolutionary tree, but also suggests its fiery genes could be added to the molecular biologist’s toolkit alongside those from other glowing creatures like fireflies, used in human cells to shed light on processes like the circadian clock and the cell cycle in health and disease.

Written by John Ankers

Image adapted from work by Michael Tessler and Jean P. Gaffney, and colleagues

Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Scientific Reports, October 2020

They are very cool! And apparently they are called sea pickles, which is kind of cute! (X)

After three years of unprecedented warm water along the U.S. West Coast, sea temperatures in 2017 had finally cooled. Fat shrimplike krill had returned and again were providing rich meals for salmon. Sea lions and other marine mammals were no longer washing ashore shriveled and starving. Things appeared to be getting back to normal.

Then they showed up.

Beginning this spring, millions of bizarre primitive-seeming jellyfish-like bioluminescent sea creatures—some more than two feet long—started gumming up research nets, glomming onto fishing hooks, and cascading onto beaches along the West Coast. These stubbly gelatinous animals called pyrosomes (each is technically a colony of other multi-celled animals called zooids) are cone-shaped tunicates normally found in the tropics, but they are spotted once in a while as far north as British Columbia. But this spring they started swarming the eastern Pacific in masses never before recorded, stretching from Oregon to the Gulf of Alaska.

"It's really weird," says Jennifer Fisher, a faculty research assistant with Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center. "I've never seen anything like it."

Neither has Rick Brodeur, a research biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon. And he's been studying jellies and other gelatinous creatures in the Pacific Northwest for 30 years.

"It's just unbelievable how many of them there are," Brodeur says.

One research net pulled up 60,000 in five minutes. Salmon fishermen near Sitka, Alaska, gave up fishing because longliners couldn't keep the strange tubular beasts off their hooks. They dominated the water column for several hundred feet. But no one knows how or why.

"They got here and have been flourishing—just super abundant," Fisher says. "But that's the weird thing: Why here? Why now?"