A strange and extraordinary creature with a transparent body. An unusual finding was that of a New Zealand fisherman who spotted a being with a gelatinous body in the sea off the coast of the Karikari peninsula. It was a salpida
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
A strange and extraordinary creature with a transparent body. An unusual finding was that of a New Zealand fisherman who spotted a being with a gelatinous body in the sea off the coast of the Karikari Peninsula.
“I kept looking thinking: 'what is this thing? '. She must have been the size of a can, she was coming very slowly towards me, on the surface of the water ", said Stewart Fraser. Although hesitant at first due to his bizarre appearance of her, he decided to take her aboard for a moment and take some pictures.
The animal was then identified as salpe, or salpida, a being of the order of Tagliacei with a transparent and gelatinous structure, endowed with primitive muscle bands (hemimials). These are organisms planktonics and filter feeders, that in the course of their evolution they have lost the chord and developed a digestive system of tubular shape.
They have a complex life cycle. In the solitary life stage, known as an oozoid, it is a single animal that reproduces asexually, creating a chain of hundreds of individuals. That would be the case with the solitary individual found in New Zealand.
The chain, on the other hand, constitutes the aggregate phase of the cycle, known as the blastozoid. Individuals remain attached to each other, forming long light chains to swim and feed as a group. But each grows and reproduces sexually. In any case, observing this transparent creature, alone or in a group, is quite rare.
Roberta Ragni
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