OK i had no idea what tunicates were, though i’d heard the terms and seen pics a few times. Now that I have them placed in my mental picture of the tree of life, they FREAK MY SHIT OUT. It’s like, hey, u got a central nervous system formed around a line, seems like having a solid form with easily recognized appendages would be a good idea, right? Naw, fuck you, we wanna be amorphous lovecraftian bagpipes and crude approximations of cephalopods with glass skeletons. No thanks, ocean. You can keep them.
davidc1says
The natural world is just crazy .And thanks doc ,another web site i will have to bookmark and visit .
What with all these cool web sites i i can’t watch as much cats and dash cam footage as i want .
Artorsays
Yay! I guessed it was a salp before I followed the link. Do I get a prize?
We get masses of these at certain times of the year when there are plankton blooms where I dive a lot in Northern New Zealand – some days they have been so dense that you can’t see the surface from a couple of meters down – just salp! And When you get out you have to was off the salp that is stuck all over you and your gear. I remember being surprised when I first came across them, and a marine biologist I was with told me that contrary to what they looked like, they were evolutionarily more closely related to me, than to a jelly fish!
joehoffmansays
Satan @4: I’m going to enjoy repeating “amorphous lovecraftian bagpipes” to myself over and over today.
The link calls it a fish. Is it actually a vertebrate? That kinda looks like a skeletal structure in there, but holy shit that’s weird.
Not a fish. Not a vertebrate. It is a chordate, though.
sure looks like a salp to me.
OK i had no idea what tunicates were, though i’d heard the terms and seen pics a few times. Now that I have them placed in my mental picture of the tree of life, they FREAK MY SHIT OUT. It’s like, hey, u got a central nervous system formed around a line, seems like having a solid form with easily recognized appendages would be a good idea, right? Naw, fuck you, we wanna be amorphous lovecraftian bagpipes and crude approximations of cephalopods with glass skeletons. No thanks, ocean. You can keep them.
The natural world is just crazy .And thanks doc ,another web site i will have to bookmark and visit .
What with all these cool web sites i i can’t watch as much cats and dash cam footage as i want .
Yay! I guessed it was a salp before I followed the link. Do I get a prize?
We get masses of these at certain times of the year when there are plankton blooms where I dive a lot in Northern New Zealand – some days they have been so dense that you can’t see the surface from a couple of meters down – just salp! And When you get out you have to was off the salp that is stuck all over you and your gear. I remember being surprised when I first came across them, and a marine biologist I was with told me that contrary to what they looked like, they were evolutionarily more closely related to me, than to a jelly fish!
Satan @4: I’m going to enjoy repeating “amorphous lovecraftian bagpipes” to myself over and over today.