How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 062: Introducing another interesting Ocean Animal, The Pyrosome
The pyrosome is a cool animal colony made up of physically linked zooids that form a streamlined cone-shape structure with a jet propelled movement.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session62
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast, session 62. Today on the show, we're gonna talk about an animal that is described by some divers as the unicorn of the sea. It looks terrifying, but of course, like many giant animals, it's quite harmless. And we're gonna talk all about it today on the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. (upbeat music) - Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. Helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host. He just discovered periscope and might be slightly addicted, Andrew Lewin. (upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up For Blue Podcast. Your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of Speak Up For Blue.com, marine ecologist, and self-proclaimed ocean printer. And today's exciting, because actually this week is exciting, because we've talked a lot about, or we're talking a lot about the unique discoveries that I don't normally talk about on the podcast. One, I don't normally talk about because, I mean, they're even though they're really cool to talk about, they're very difficult to describe. So today I'm gonna be referring a lot to videos and pictures that I'm looking at as I'm doing this podcast, but what I'm gonna be doing is sending you to our show notes and with links to different pictures and videos, embedded videos. So if you wanna go and look at the animal that we're gonna be talking about, the giant pyrozone, you can do so just by going to the show notes, speakupforblue.com/session62. And we'll see how this goes. The first time I've really described an animal like this, so it's gonna be interesting. Anyway, so I discovered this article on the Business Insider, Australia, believe it or not. They had an article describing is, the weirdest worm-like giant whale-sized animal in the ocean that they've ever seen. And of course, it's what they call a 65, and I looked into the article a little more, got the animal, it's actually a pyrozone. It's what divers are calling very unique. It's like the unicorn of the sea, where it's very rare to actually see one, especially the giant ones that you see. But we're gonna get into that in just a second. But going through those articles and trying to do as much research as possible before I tell you about it, I noticed that they linked to a 2013 article by R.R. Helm at the deepcnews.com, or friends over at deepcnews.com, who did an article and they entitled it, the 60-foot-long jet-powered animal you've probably never heard of, which I think is a much better description of the article. Because it is a weird-looking animal when you look at it, and I'm gonna describe it in just a sec, but when you say weird people, I find people find it like it could be dangerous or you don't wanna be close to it, but it's actually very gentle. And when you go in the deepcnews article, which you can see in session 62, so speak up for blue. Our show notes, speakupforblue.com/session62, or speakupforblue.com/session62. Just go to the show notes. You can actually see the picture of what a giant one looks like, and essentially what this is, it's actually a colony of clones, believe it or not, right? For all you Star Wars buffs out there and Star Trek buffs up there, the R.R. Helm says that, the author says that if the Borg and the Clone Wars had a baby, it would be a pyrazone. So, that I find interesting, and he makes reference to a lot of how these animals, these zuids, or zuids, that are these small animals, are actually physically, they actually clone themselves, hence the Clone Wars. They actually clone themselves, and instead of being mentally connected, they're actually physically connected. Mentally connected like the Borgs, I guess. I'm not a big Star Trek buff as this guy is, but they're essentially physically connected, and every time they clone one, each other, they get connected and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually it can be quite long. It can be up to 60 feet long, and six feet, two meters wide. Okay, so six feet or two meters wide. So, what happens is that one end, there's a peak, like a closed off end, that tends to be the quote unquote head. At the other end, it's actually open. And like I said before, it could actually, the depending on the size of the actual animal, or the colony, it could actually be six foot wide, six feet wide, which is massive. And when divers touch it, they say it's kind of like a fleshy, they call it like a feather boa, so it's very fleshy, very soft, and of course it's harmless. However, there is a warning on this article, on both articles actually, and this is do not swim inside the pyrozone. Although some of these holes can be six and a half foot long, we can actually fit one. You can actually fit a full human inside, saying that K Galette Holmes reports finding a two meter pyrozone with a dead penguin trapped inside. So she must have swum into it, they open it and they just couldn't turn, or it couldn't get inside. So it got jammed in the apex of the pyrozone, and its beak was just poking through the colony matrix when it found it. So even fairy penguins are quite strong. In fact, it could not... The fact that it could not break free shows how tough some pyrozomes are. So the actual bond, the actual linkage, physical linkage between some of these pyrozomes, or so it's actually quite strong to the point where a penguin couldn't swim through them, so it couldn't tear them apart. Obviously, it must have had some difficulty. So it's kind of interesting in that respect. They don't eat animals. Essentially, what they do is they're filter feeders. So the animals will filter from the outside in. So they'll suck in the water from the outside, and they're gonna take all the nutrients it can, so the plankton, either Fido or Zoop plankton, put it in its little box that it has, 'cause it has like a little box for stomach, and then the water just kind of gets put into the tube, and then it gets pushed out the end, right, the opening. And so essentially it creates the suction of coming into, the water coming into the tube, and then the pushing out actually allows them to be a quasi jet propelled, jet propulsion. So it moves very slow because these animals suck in this water very slow, but it tends to move steadily along the sea floor, and they can range in size from microscopic to 60 feet long. Which is kind of a very cool thing. There's a video actually of them putting them actually swimming, and the video's from an eagle hawk dive in Australia. It must be a dive outfit and a dive shop. And they actually compare pyrosomes, giant pyrosomes, to salps. And salps are essentially, they're like pelagic sea squirts. Very similar, except the linkage that they do is not uniform. It looks more, how do you describe it here? Hold on one sec. There's actually one of the articles I saw described it. Let's see if I can find it here quickly, quickly and do quickly, quickly. Here we go. Salp roams the ocean as well, but they're not, oh yeah, okay. They form, they do not form tubes, but they form, they link up into chains. So you can actually almost see the individual, each individual animal. And they don't have the jet propulsion. They actually pump with pulses through the water, rather than, so rather than continuously pushing water through like the pyrosomes. So they actually just like pulse it in. And they're on that dive, that dive video that we're gonna embed into the blog post. So it's kind of cool to look at the differences between how they link up. The pyrosome looks almost uniform. You don't even, you can't eat like from your naked eye. You can't even tell the different animals. It's when you bring it under a microscope that you can actually tell. And there's pictures in the link to each article. And you can actually, some of them, you can actually see the individual animals and some you can't. So it's quite interesting. The one other interesting fact about the pyrosome is that it's actually bioluminescent. Which means that it can, the animals can take light and reflect light in certain colors. I think it's all different types of colors. Pink, with a pink, blue, green, white. So it shows flashes. So I think it's kind of interesting. And you see some, you see some divers taking pictures of it and you get a different color back. A lot of them are pink, which is really cool. So really cool animal that you don't normally see. And you see some divers that are really looking at it. There's some pictures from the BBC. There's some pictures from individuals. There's some pictures from the Eagle Hawk Dive. It's really an interesting thing. And we're gonna try and pull as many videos as possible to embed so you can actually see this. When you watch it swim, it's actually quite slow. And almost just like this dream-like thing. It's really cool. It's very hard to describe in words. I'm not doing a very good job. But you can look at it on the show notes, bekaforblue.com/session62 to take a look at this video and how they suggest you do. 'Cause it's kinda fun. You can look it on your mobile phone as well. We'll put the link, if I can get the link, we'll put the link into the description of the actual podcasts. So you can see it on your mobile phone as well. So it's really cool. Just a fun animal to watch. It's nothing like, doesn't have a lot of characteristics to it, but if you think about how you look at it and it looks so uniform, but it's actually made of thousands and thousands of individual animals that are physically linked together and just move so smoothly, but use each other to feed and to make themselves bigger. I think it's really cool. And I would imagine that would be a function of not getting eaten by something else. The bigger you are, the harder it is to eat you, I guess. So it's kind of interesting. We don't know, researchers don't know a lot about this animal, but we are getting more and more pictures from divers and videos from divers, which is kinda cool with today's technology and being shared. So I'm sure somebody out there is going to be studying them and finding out more about them and their function in the ecosystem. So I thought that'd be kinda cool to bring you that. So yeah, so that's the end of today's sort of topic. Before I go, before I let you go, I want to just let you know of something I've been working on. So as you know, I've been working on this podcast for the last four and a half months or so. I really appreciate you guys listening. I really do. We've just surpassed, as of last Friday, we surpassed almost 11,000 downloads, which is awesome for me. And that week, last week, we actually surpassed 1,000 in one week, which is a record, which is awesome. So we're growing, which is nice. That means more people are listening to the podcast and you guys, you're sharing and your word of mouth is really working, I really appreciate it. Now, I don't get paid for this. I don't, you know, it's one of those things where I don't bring on advertisements. I try and sell through the store that we have, at speakupforlu.com/shop so that we can help out our partner, Sea Turtle Forever, and support this podcast and the website. But this is something that I want to do full time. I want to really get into the podcast. I really want to get into the articles. I want to get into the interviews and get more interviews. And right now, it's really hard to do because I do this more as a hobby because I can't just support myself by not earning any money by just doing this. So I want to start going into it more full time. And to do that, there aren't a lot of options for podcasters to make a lot of money other than advertisements. And I really don't want to fill out a whole thing with advertisements. So what I've done or what I'm in the process of doing is filling out a crowdfunding profile for on patreon.com. And patreon.com, if you don't know, it's a crowdfunding platform where supporters who like either a podcast or a YouTube channel or both basically they're for people who create things. If they like them, they can support them financially by giving some sort of support, whether it be a dollar, whether it be $3, whether it be $10, whatever the levels that are offered. And what happens is done either on a per month or per creation video or creation basis. So I'm going the per month way because I create so many podcasts and I want to start creating videos eventually. That was one of my goals. But essentially what I'm asking is if you really like the podcast and you want to see it continue and you want to see it get even better where I can spend more time on the articles and get really in depth, get more interviews going and really talk to people who are out there and protecting the ocean, we can do that or you can help support this podcast by going to my Patreon page, which will come out next week. So you're listening to this, this is Tuesday. So next Monday I'm going to be launching this Patreon page and I'm very excited to do it. And what I'm looking forward to is your support if you really like this podcast and you want to see it. And it doesn't have to be a lot of money. It could be a dollar a month, it could be $3 a month. If you go to my profile page when I release it you can actually provide whatever level you want and there's different incentives to do so as well. So you can do that and I'd really appreciate it. But just think about it for the week and let me know how you feel about it. You can go in the comments at the speakupforblue.com/session62 and you can just let me know how you feel about supporting something like that. I'd like to get your thoughts on it. It took me a while to actually fill in this profile and the different levels and whatnot and I'll constantly be changing it as I go through it and get more experience with it. But it took me a while to actually decide to do this. But it seems like a lot of people are getting on board with this kind of funding 'cause they like certain creations or certain podcasts or certain videos and they want to support that person. So I would really appreciate it. It helps me help other people, which is what I'm all about. So stay tuned for that and I'll talk about it a little more on Thursday and we can go more into it. Okay, well thank you and until then, have a great Tuesday and I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did. Check out the videos on the show notes, speakerforblue.com/session62. Until then, my name is Andrew Liu and I am the host of the Speaker For Blue podcast. Happy conservation. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)