Portuguese man o'war (#38)

I bet you thought I'd spare you with animal facts? Nope, I'll just sneak them in when you least expect them.

Here we go with the fascinating Portuguese man o'war (de: Portugiesische Galeere), which is sort of a jellyfish and lives in the Pacific Ocean.

https://el-aviso.es/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/portuguese-galley-3929359_960_720.jpg

It got it's name from the man-of-war, a powerful warship in the 15th and 16th century. The animal resembles the Portuguese version of this sailing ship and also behaves like one. It has it's own "sail", a float filled with carbon monoxide, with which it travels thousands of miles, floating on the ocean's surface. In the water, it drags along tentacles, which can cause painful stings.

The Portuguese man o'war belongs to the sisphonophores. Although they look like one animal, they consist of of multiple smaller animals. Those tiny animals are genetically identical but they're specialized and form a colony together.

In alignment with the ship metaphor, the Portuguese man o'war could be seen as the impersonation of the philosophical thought experiment of the ship of Theseus. The experiment asks the question, whether an object stays the same object, even if all it’s components have been replaced.

Which leads me to the question, maybe this fact replaced another (less important) one in your brain – are you still the same person now?