[HN Gopher] Giant Pyrosome
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Giant Pyrosome
Author : integrale
Score : 110 points
Date : 2022-01-31 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oceana.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (oceana.org)
| 323 wrote:
| What's stopping a bank of fish, or a whale from eating the whole
| thing?
| zarq wrote:
| Likely the appearance of the colony being a single, gigantic,
| thing.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27213-zoologger-hollo...
|
| This article has a picture of a sea turtle taking a nice chomp
| out of a smaller one. Maybe nothing that eats them ever feels
| like eating the whole the colony. It would seem it's pretty
| tough to tear it.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Is a Dermochelys, very big and specialized turtles with
| powerful jaws.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Chordates are known for their chemistry weapons. The
| bioluminiscence warning must be there for some reason.
| throwhauser wrote:
| It freaks me out that tunicates are chordates. How can a
| creature's body plan get that bizarre, from a starting point
| similar to vertebrates? They're not just dissimilar to familiar
| animals, they're barely recognizable _as_ animals.
| contingo wrote:
| Tunicates evolved long before animals that you would recognize
| as typical vertebrates. In their free-swimming larval state,
| tunicates do have a "notochord", or nerve chord, running along
| their head-tail axis. This structure is a kind of proto-spine.
| The evolution of true vertebrates proceeded from this condition
| by neoteny, the retention of larval traits in the adult body
| plan. Pyrosomes look so bizarre compared to a layman's notion
| of what a chordate should look like because they are colonial
| aggregations of lots of individual adult tunicates that have
| resorbed their notochords (I'm pretty sure that's the case,
| despite what the photo description says).
| eumoria wrote:
| Freaks me out this article says over and over [...] large
| enough for a person to enter.
|
| I'm not going in there. That's scary.
| ziggus wrote:
| "The Giant Pyrosome is a free-floating, colonial tunicate that is
| made of thousands of identical clones, together forming a hollow
| cylindrical structure that can be 60 feet (18 m) long and wide
| enough for a person to enter."
|
| Nope.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
|
| It's particularly important not to do that when the thread is
| fresh, because threads are so responsive to initial conditions.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Some more photos here:
|
| https://archive.is/dQQ70
|
| Original:
|
| http://www.divebums.com/FishID/Pages/pyrosoma_big.html
| amelius wrote:
| Are there any photos of it taken on land / on the beach?
| wiz21c wrote:
| With moving pictures it's better, just found that :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qis_rfb7fnU
| amelius wrote:
| How do these pyrosomes break fishing nets, without muscles or
| teeth?
| tasha0663 wrote:
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| "long and wide enough for a person to enter" -- has anyone seen
| it and thought, "Hmm, let me go inside, what could go wrong. I
| don't see fangs."
| tasha0663 wrote:
| Just looking at the picture that had that caption: NOPE
| overspeed wrote:
| We could send a small remote controlled submersible vessel
| through it. Get some lights in there and see it from the inside
| out.
| castis wrote:
| This thing looks far too much like a digestive tract for me to
| ever consider going inside it willingly. I suppose after direct
| observation for a while I might be more comfortable with the
| creature but I feel like I'd never get past that initial
| feeling...
| scrumbledober wrote:
| The article mentions that unless all of the individual organisms
| die at the same time it is theoretically possible for the colony
| to live forever. I wonder if we have any way of telling how old a
| particular colony could possibly be?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Blob of Theseus
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
| ajuc wrote:
| > I wonder if we have any way of telling how old a particular
| colony could possibly be?
|
| Maybe sequencing DNA from a lot of the individual organisms and
| counting how many differences there are? Older colonies should
| accumulate the differences, right?
| 9dev wrote:
| Radiocarbon dating of samples, maybe?
| 323 wrote:
| Radiocarbon dating only works for dead stuff:
|
| > _When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon
| with its environment, and thereafter the amount of 14C it
| contains begins to decrease as the 14C undergoes radioactive
| decay. Measuring the amount of 14C in a sample from a dead
| plant or animal, such as a piece of wood or a fragment of
| bone, provides information that can be used to calculate when
| the animal or plant died._
| 9dev wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense. Thank you.
| AitchEmArsey wrote:
| arwineap wrote:
| Once a year we get hundreds of thousands of pyrosomes in our
| waters. The first time we saw them I spent the whole trip out of
| the water researching what they might be
|
| FWIW they ended up seeming harmless, my "neighbors" were swimming
| with them
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Where is this?
| klyrs wrote:
| I found this, looking for more pictures of the critters:
| https://www.insider.com/pyrosome-sea-creature-bloom-
| worries-... apparently, there was a 'bloom' of them in the
| pacific northwest in 2017
| latchkey wrote:
| Instantly made me think of the Water Tentacle in The Abyss...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO7Vyhy0iXs
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