Question: what is the wierdest species you have ever found????

Jon Copley answered on 15 Jun 2010:

In 2003 I was on an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico, using a minisub to dive to around 650 metres deep. On one dive, while working on the seafloor, a creature unlike anything I had ever seen before drifted out of the darkness towards the sub. It was around seven feet tall, with a shaggy “body”, and a long “neck” that could get longer and shorter a bit like a car radio aerial, and a bulbous “head” at the end of the “neck”, and then very long fine tentacles trailing from its body over the seafloor behind it.

It was drifting across the seafloor in the current, and the weirdest thing was that as it approached undersea rocks, it would extend its “neck” to raise the “head”, then shorten the “neck” to pull its “body” up out of the way of the rocks so it drifted over them. And all the time it was trawling the seafloor behind it with those long tentacles.

It honestly looked like something from Doctor Who, and I had *never* seen anything like it. We showed the video of it to another biologist who was an expert in a particular group of animals called siphonophores. It turns out it was a siphonophore, but almost certainly a new species.

Siphonophores are actually colonies of animals that form a single body. The shaggy “body” we saw was made up of lots of individual animals called polyps, adapted for reproduction. The long trailing tentacles were polyps adapted for feeding, and the “head” was made of polyps adapted for buoyancy, forming a “float”.

Probably the most famous siphonophore is the Portuguese Man’o’war, so what we saw was one of its deep-sea cousins, though it looked very different. We know very little about deep-sea siphonophores because their bodies are made of jelly and very delicate – they get destroyed if they are caught in nets. It’s only since we’ve been using submersibles to explore the ocean and see what’s down there with our own eyes that we’ve really become aware of them. Some siphonophores can form floating colonies 40 metres long and they are beautiful – their bodies look like they are made out of finely-blown glass (although they are soft and squishy to touch!).