Nature is the craziest. It’s crazier than science-fiction movies. There are all sorts of weird things living in it that shouldn’t be real: there’s a thing that eats tongues, then replaces them with its body. There’s a freaking crab that eats cats, for God’s sake. And of course, there are pyrosomes, a 60-foot long tubular (totally tubular) creature that floats around in the oceans of the southern hemisphere. They’re exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, that they’re sometimes called the unicorns of the sea. “What the f*ck?” said the narwhale.
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. Imagine a whole field of Dolly the sheeps, all smashed into one giant mega-sheep, eating entire fields of grass in one bite and fueling the world’s wool quota every shearing season. Each zooid clone is able to clone itself again and again, enabling the pyrosome to get exponentially larger, leading me to believe that somewhere down there in the briny depths is a pyrosome of massive proportions, eating ships and fighting colossal squids in epic battles.
The colony is shaped like a giant funnel, closed at one end and open on the other. The open end is the mouth (sort of – a mouth is as close of a comparison to us as I can make), 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 (I’ll call it a butt, because again, that’s as close of a comparison I can make).
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 its butt is also how these massive colonies move around, like if you were to eat a thousand pounds of bad mexican food and try to move across your kitchen floor without using your legs, if you know what I mean. According to the Nerdist, they are “so delicate, a gentle wave carries enough force to tear one apart.” Someone better tell the diver below that he’s riding a super rare, incredibly fragile colony of clones, quick.
