State jellyfish

State jellyfish
	Portuguese galley ( Physalia physalis )
Systematics
without rank:	Holozoa
without rank:	Multicellular animals (Metazoa)
without rank:	Tissue animals (Eumetazoa)
Trunk :	Cnidarians (Cnidaria)
Class :	Hydrozoa (Hydrozoa)
Order :	State jellyfish
Scientific name
	Siphonophorae
	Eschscholtz , 1829

The state jellyfish (Siphonophorae) are an order of stick-forming and free-swimming cnidarians of the class of hydrozoans , whose sticks each consist of hundreds to thousands of polyps .

features

The individual animals of the hive are so highly specialized and diverse that they can almost be viewed as organs of a single organism . There are feeding polyps (gastro- / autozooids), tactile polyps, defense polyps (dactylozooids), sexual polyps (gonozooids) and cover polyps (phyllozooids) as well as the upper floating buoy (pneumatophore) and numerous swimming bells (nectophores). The most famous state jellyfish is the Portuguese galley ( Physalia physalis ). The tentacles of individual species can be up to 50 meters long.

Catching prey

In 2005 US researchers caught some specimens of a new species of the genus Erenna ( Erenna sp. Nov. ) From a depth of 1,600 to 2,600 m and found that newly formed tentacles emitted blue-green, fully grown tentacles but red light. The researchers suspected that, contrary to previous assumptions, the jellyfish with this red light in the deep sea attract seldom found fish as food sacrifices. Since, on the one hand, state jellyfish feed primarily on fish and two of the caught specimens just digested one, but on the other hand the probability of such an accidental food finding of the jellyfish at this depth is very low, this would mean that such fish definitely perceive the red light and be attracted by it successfully.