The Huffington Post has posted an entry on Pyrosomes in their Green section (link).

I thought I’d tell you a little about this genus of “animal”

Pyrosomes include a variety of pelagic tunicates. What that means is they exist far from the shore (pelagic part) and are sea invertebrates that are part of the tunicata subphylum (tunicates part). The genus Pyrosoma currently includes a wide list of species, subspecies and subgenera (link).

In simplistic terms, pyrosomes are cone-shaped colonnies, made up of hundreds of thousands of indvidual zooids that spawn from a single egg. zooids are minuscule  multicellular animals  (few millimeters in size) that join in a gelatinous tunic that ultimately form the pyrosome.

Pyrosomes can span from a few centimeters to several meters in length (pictures below).

Those “spikes” are papillae on the individuals making up the colony. The way this animal feeds is by filtration of outside water through each zooid. It feeds on microscopic plant cells (plankton).

And the more interesting part is that they are bio-luminescent. They glow an intense blue-green in the dark (pink is basically a natural color not that it’s glowing), particularly when disturbed.

Pyrosomes have been called “the unicorns of the sea” by Marine biologist Rebecca Helm, because they are so rare to spot. that is why the HuffPost decided to talk about them and show a recent video of them.

It is truly marvelous how creatures of the earth have evolved and branched so beautifully. It makes it the more horrible how we as humans tend to wipe off some of these animals (not pyrosomes per se but countless other animals). I thought I’d leave you with this video of the 10 rarest and most endangered animals.

The take away message of this? Preserve life on earth. It is too precious to waste. A shout out to WWF @world_wildlife for their work on trying to protect nature.

E.