Would you believe me if I said this is a photo of an animal?
How about if I told you it was a chordate?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Would you believe me if I said this is a photo of an animal?
How about if I told you it was a chordate?
In order: Yes. Yes, but only because I think you in particular are somewhat trustworthy.
Is this a colony of sea squirts?
links
or it aten’t real
Some breed of coral, would be my first guess…
[checks a perhaps-inobvious source of info on the thingie in the picture]
…and I’d be wrong. Well, well. Weird little beastie(s).
I think I know what animal it is exactly, but I feel bad revealing it. Tunicates are a weird subphylum.
The picture link says Botryllus planus; the WikiP page for Botryllus says:
“Botryllus is a genus of colonial ascidian tunicates in the family Styelidae.”
So sugarfrosted@#2 is correct. Dingdingding!
Tunicates are freaking weird.
Where is the fekkin’ ?
In the larval stage. Once they find a spot and settle down, they lose it.
That Creator™ dude was kinda a putz….
It’s uncle Harry. I always said that sessile lifestyle isn’t good for his shape.
But is it “an animal,” singular, or a colony of many animals? A solitary tunicate typically has two siphons: one for taking stuff in, and one for sending it out. As I understand it, in this colonial tunicate, each of the smallest holes we see in the photo is an inlet siphon, and the larger holes are shared outlet siphons. For another example (with explanation), see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botrylloides#/media/File:Botrylloides_magnicoecum,_Bare_Island.jpg
So is that a single organism or many? How about if it started as a few different colonies that merged into one as they grew?
I found this: https://invasions.si.edu/nemesis/browseDB/SpeciesSummary.jsp?TSN=159376 which gives a source for the photo (in case people were curious)
Heh. Define “single organism”. Are you one?
Hmm. The wikipedia article on tunicates says:
Huh? I thought cellulose was exclusive to plant cell walls?
Well, the mildly deranged penguin is certainly singular, much to the relief of all the multiverses.
Tunicates may be weirder than we think. WHOLE GENOME COMPARISONS REVEALS A POSSIBLE CHIMERIC ORIGIN FOR A MAJOR METAZOAN ASSEMBLAGE. This paper suggests: “The simplest explanation is that the modern tunicate (as represented by Ciona intestinalis) began as a hybrid between a primitive vertebrate and some other organism, perhaps from an extinct and unidentified protostome phylum.” This echoes ideas from “The Origins of Larvae”, which I thought could always be tested by genome comparison.
You can’t fool me. This is obviously an aquatic orange peel.
Rock Vomit.
Colonial tunicate? We used to get them (not this particular species) growing all over oyster boxes when I used to work for an oyster farm.
They were real pests too. The star tunicate I believe. I was under the impression they were an invasive species.