World's longest "Stringy stingy thingy" found, deep in the Indian Ocean

[Northern_Piper]

Scientists are giving various names for it, but I like “The Entity” the best.

Scientists call it a siphonophore Apolemia, but you can call it the world’s longest “long stringy stingy thingy,” the giant alien tentacle or just “the entity.”

An international team of ocean researchers says it may have discovered the longest living … thing … in the world, although the thing’s alien nature makes it hard to call it a single animal. It’s actually a giant colony of tiny, genetically identical clones that work together to create a larger, jellyfish-like predator in the deep sea.

Massive, deep-sea ‘entity’ leaves ocean scientists ‘blown away’

[thorny_locust]

Neat. Thanks for posting it.

From the link:

The so-called entity is actually a massive ribbon of tiny ocean-dwelling organisms called zooids, which latch onto one another and clone themselves so they can act like one big, cohesive organism. The zooids become dedicated organs for the larger colony and spend their whole lives fulfilling a single function such as stinging prey, digesting food, moving around or reproducing.

Isn’t that basically what multicellular organisms do, though with a different reproductive technique? The individual cells are genetically identical – clones – but become part of dedicated organs and spend their whole lives fulfilling the function of those organs?

Do the individual zooids in the ribbon organism retain the ability to live on their own, if something separates them from the larger group?

[John_DiFool]

Video is not related to the title of the article.