There’s an immense spiral of doom afoot, and it’s not just the one inside my brain. It’s my utter delight to introduce you to Apolemia, a genus of the absolutely freaky-deaky order Siphonophorae.
When I woke up this morning and saw a trending news story about a 390-foot-long spiral of venomous sea critter, I thought: wait a minute, I’ve seen that long boi before. The Guardian is replaying its best deep-sea hits, which I can’t blame them for, because siphonophores are infuriatingly interesting. The closest I’ve ever come to manslaughter in the workplace involved a male editor being extremely sure I could definitely not be right about how siphonophores worked because that would obviously make no sense.
Look upon my Works, ye Mighty and despair!
First, the simple bit. This particular siphonophore, found off the coast of Western Australia in 2020, is indeed forming a spiral of death and destruction. Members of the genus Apolemia form net-like structures in the sea by dangling strings of stingers in strategic arrays—”long stringy stingy thingies,” as the New Zealand Encyclopedia puts it.
The 2020 specimen is, by some metrics, the longest known animal on the planet (though only a smidge longer than the full tentacle spread of a jellyfish once caught in Massachusetts, lest you assume only Australia harbors squiggly nightmares). But the caveats to that superlative bring us to the tricky part of explaining a siphonophore. Calling an individual siphonophore an individual is sort of like saying a corporation as a person, except without the gross capitalist implications and for reasons that are arguably good and correct, though no less mind-melting.
Siphonophores are colonial animals. What’s a colonial animal? Googling the phrase will mostly show you links about naked mole rats and bees, which, while cooperative and social and awesome and metal as hell and all that, are just animals that live in colonies and act accordingly. It’s not like siphonophores are literally the only colonial animal as opposed to colony of animals, but there aren’t exactly a plethora of examples around to make the concept as easily grok-able as one might like.
Sorry if I’m over-simplifying and butchering your life’s work, but “colonial animal” is sort of a catch-all term for “this weird thing lives in the ocean and we could spend the rest of time debating whether it’s one thing or a community of things and the debate would really be more of a semantic argument over the nature of individuality and life itself than about the characteristics of this weird thing that lives in the ocean.”
In fact, many of these critters were originally characterized as zoophytes—a defunct classification that imagined a branch of life somewhere between plant and animal.
Siphonophores are made up of specialized bits called zooids. One type of zooid might handle digestion, another might produce stinging venom to catch prey, and yet others could be designed to move the creature or keep it aloft. “Okay, so those are just cells,” said that editor I almost murdered a few years back. No, Kevin! Each zooid is multicellular in its own right; if you caught one floating free and looked at it under a microscope, you might think it was a whole-ass animal (this is an exaggeration because anyone looking at siphonophore zooids under a microscope probably has a more than basic grasp of marine life but… calm yourself.) “Okay, so they’re just animals living together cooperatively.” Wrong again! The zooids may each look like independent critters, but they need each other to survive—like the members of The Breakfast Club. They also all sprout from one initial proto-bud that caries the genetic knowledge necessary to make all the little bits and bobs of each future siphonophore component. “So they’re like organs.” I don’t know, man, do you get bigger by budding new hearts and spleens and anuses to branch out from their originals?
It’s totally possible to make a sound and reasonable argument that a siphonophore colony represents one individual animal. It’s also totally possible to make a sound and reasonable argument that a siphonophore represents a colony of individual animals that are preternaturally good at working together for reasons we don’t understand. I like this attempt at a distinction on r/askscience, mainly because it includes an edit that boils down to “look, yeah, this is all just about trying to put things in boxes, you’re right, it doesn’t make much sense, try not to stress.”
One thing is for certain: Siphonophores remind us that life doesn’t always look like us. Sure, we know that not every creature is a placental mammal or a bipedal ape or a vertebrate with a wrinkly brain. But it’s easy to forget how many other assumptions we make about what it means to be a living thing. What it means to be one, what it takes to survive and thrive, what evolution does or doesn’t drive us to do.
There are scientists and philosophers who argue that we should think of cancer as the inevitable conclusion of multi-cellularity: we exist as a collection of cells, so some of our cells are going to be selfish and grow at the expense of the rest of their community. Some of those same scientists and philosophers argue that human beings evolved to do best when cooperating with one another.
We each have little worlds inside us, and the whole planet is a super-organism in the sea of the universe. Proceed accordingly.
Rachel’s Recs
here’s a place where I’ll end each newsletter, or at least some of them, with some things I’m enjoying at the moment or think you should check out
Read: Everything the Light Touches by Sabrina Imbler, which I don’t yet have a copy of but assume contains at least one essay on siphonophores that will make this newsletter look like something scrawled on a Jersey Turnpike rest stop bathroom door, which is kind of what I want this newsletter to be anyway.
Come to: Niagara Bar in Manhattan on Monday, December 5 for a free event featuring me reading from my book.
Buy: This t-shirt I made about turning into a crab. If you’re looking for a t-shirt about turning into a crab.
Watch: 1899 on Netflix. It has nothing to do with this newsletter but it does have an ocean in it and a lot of existential dread.