If you ’re not on the social media program , you might not know that Twitter can be a haven for strange and wonderful information – if you know where to look . The tiro tweeter can assay solace in the welcoming tentacles of science Twitter , where enthusiasts of the niche corners of the animal kingdom swop fact and memes without a troll in sight .
One such fountain of noesis come in the form of a yarn byRebecca R Helm , an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville , who was imparting some wisdom about a peculiar marine species : Thetys vagina . This salpa is one of many devil dog invertebrates that show the extremely efficient use of jet actuation as a means of getting around . While they may look like an foreign lifeform , they ’re less unlike from us than you might reckon .
“ Salps are tunicate , which are tight relatives of craniate , ” state Helm to IFLScience . “ They even have the same embryotic structures that , in humans , spring a backbone ( called a notochord ) . A common misconception is that anything jelly - like in the ocean is a jellyfish , [ but]Thetys vaginaare more closely related to humans than they are to the Vanessa Bell - work man-of-war ! ”
As Helm ’s yarn reveals , our exotic - sounding , far - take out cousins have a spicy tale to state …
Not related to the story , Helm sum , “ the person who named this animal claimed they were naming it after the sea houri genus Aplysia ' " case . " Like … for a sword … But I digress … ”
This report is about sexual urge .
Something of a passkey of all things squishy and confusing , Helm also stepped to the plate to excuse what on Earth was going on when a ~120 - meter ( ~394 - invertebrate foot ) noodle appeared in the ocean just off Australia . The slim creature is a siphonophore , affectionately hump as the “ long stringy scrimpy thingy , ” and is actually a Brobdingnagian dependency of flyspeck animals called zooids acting as one entity , blurring the air between acting as an organ and an animal .
Unlike the salpa , the recollective stringy meagre thingy is a kind of jelly , write Helm in a Tweet . “ It ’s made of meg of interconnected clones , like if the Borg and the Clone Wars had a babe together . There are about a dozen different jobs a clone can do in the colony , & each clone is specialized to a particular task … A siphonophore colony in a line creates a drapery of pestilent tentacle in the subject ocean , but in THIS case , the animal is run in a galax - same spiral , the longsighted wisp - like tentacles draped below . ”
What a mad and wonderful world we live in .
