“Despite its appearance, the Portuguese man o' war is not a true jellyfish […] (true jellyfish are single organisms), but a colonial organism made up of specialized individual animals (of the same species) called zooids or polyps.” … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_man_o%27_war …
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…Can someone explain to me what this means, exactly? How do we recognize that the man o' war is a colonial organism and which parts are an "individual animal"? Anatomically, how does it differ from jellyfish? (Cc
@temptoetiam maybe?) …2 replies 0 retweets 1 likeShow this thread -
…And more specifically, do the various cells in the man o'war share the same genome, or not? If yes, what distinguishes cells which are part of the same zooid and those which are not? If not, how does the whole thing reproduce? I'm confused, and Wikipedia is unclear.
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I think the answers are: 1) yes, they are genetically identical, and 2) the zooids are individual units which resemble other species of free-living organisms. This page linked from wikipedia is a bit more detailed and has some helpful photos in the sidebar http://www.siphonophores.org/SiphOrganization.php …
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