Two divers who were filming off the coast of New Zealand recently spotted something rare: a giant worm-like organism known as a pyrosome.
Pyrosomes are actually a giant colony of much smaller creatures called zooids, a marine invertebrate that measures in at just over an inch long. This is where it gets weird. The pyrosome isn’t just a whole bunch of zooids holding hands – it’s all the same zooid. Each pyrosome is made up of thousands upon thousands of clones. Each zooid clone is able to clone itself again and again, enabling the pyrosome to get exponentially larger. At night, the pyrosome comes to the surface to feed, then drops back down to the depths when the sun comes up.
The colony is shaped like a giant funnel, closed at one end and open on the other. The open end is the mouth, while the walls of the tube are made up of the zooids clones. They/it is a filter feeder, sucking in water every hour of every day, filtering out anything edible, like plankton, and then shooting the water out their other side.
If the pyrosome wasn’t sucking in this water, it wouldn’t be able to keep its shape, just like when a windsock fills up with wind. The pressure coming out of the back end is also how these massive colonies move around. According to the Nerdist, they are “so delicate, a gentle wave carries enough force to tear one apart.”
