Post #13754

ate very much with such thrust, so bathyphyses can’t just pick up and sail away somewhere. They spend their entire lives in controlled drift across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, colonies are found only at great depths, from 1000 to 4000 meters. It's dark, cold, and there's nowhere to go Hanging from the sides of the bathyphys are thin, long spaghetti zooids called dactylozooids. These are the main breadwinners: they contain hundreds of small stinging harpoon cells with poison that react to the slightest movement. Their job is to locate, immobilize and transport prey to the center of the colony. Yes, this strange pasta monster is a predator! But to active hunting, he prefers to simply hang a bunch of dactylozooids and wait for at least something edible to swim nearby. Fish, crustacean, whatever - at great depths you don’t have to choose. Then the caught victim goes to the gastrozooid clones. This is the canteen of the entire colony. Since no clone is capable of digestion, gastrozooids supply them with nutrients. They digest food, break it down into nutrients and send them to other zooids. The most delicious job! At the edge of the colony there is a gonozooid clone, which is responsible for the reproduction of Bathyphys. Moreover, a clone has only one specific sex and, accordingly, produces either seed material or eggs. As the reproductive products mature, they are simply released into the environment without any ceremony. Moreover, many bathyphyses living nearby do this almost synchronously. Apparently, there is some specific trigger for the start of reproduction - warming water, a change in current, the presence of pheromones, or maybe all at once. Since only oil workers and deep-sea submersibles observe pasta monsters, this part of the life of a colonial organism is still hidden from us. And yet, since bathyphyses have not yet become extinct, it means that their reproduction is quite successful. Sex cells meet somewhere in the water column and merge into a zygote, from which a new colony will eventually grow, and the cycle will repeat again. And here a completely logical question may arise.Why complicate everything so much? Make some clones, invent different tasks for them, distribute the work, coordinate all this with each other? Why not just do it like we do - one organism and different organs inside it? Because siphonophores as an order appeared more than 600 million years ago. Then there was absolutely nothing on earth yet. Some strange algae, coelenterates, hydras and other very strange, asymmetrical creatures unusual for us were just hanging out in the water. Life then had just moved to the multicellular level and was simply experimenting. For this time, colonial organisms were super advanced, because they already had some specialization of individual parts of the body and an internal system. Strange, but still better than nothing at all. And this same strange system has helped siphonophores survive to this day. C