Name: Salps (Salpa fusiformis)
Where it lives: Widely distributed throughout the Pacific and Atlantic.
What it eats: Phytoplankton and anything else small enough to be caught in their feeding net
Why it’s great: Often described as “Jelly balls” or “bucket full of snot”, These marine organisms are transparent and have a gelatinous consistency.
There are over 70 species of salps worldwide. Salpa fusiformis most common. Salps occur from the ocean surface to a depth of about 800 meters. They are barrel-shaped and range in size from 0.2 cm at birth to about 10 cm in adulthood. They can form long chains that drift in the sea and follow the tides.
Related: Barreleye fish – The deep-sea spinner with rotating eyes and a transparent head
Salps can also move by jet propulsion. They pump seawater through their bodies with Muscle bands that surround your body. As the water is pushed through their body and out their rear end, food is ingested and they are propelled forward. For this reason, they are members of a group known as “sea squirts.”
As opposed to jellyfishSalps do not have stinging cells. Their main food is phytoplankton, but they filter whatever they can catch in their feeding nets. internal networks of sticky mucus.
Because they filter large amounts of water, they play a crucial role in the fight against climate change (CO2). A salp swarm that spreads over 100,000 square kilometers is able to up to 4,000 tons of CO2 in a single night.
Adult salps go through two different phases: a asexual oozoic phase and a sexual blastozoic phase. When the asexual oozoid is ready to reproduce, it produces long chains of salps, each of which is a clone of itself. These salps then develop into sexually reproducing blastozoids. Initially, the entire chain consists of females, each of which produces eggs that are fertilized by neighboring male blastozoids. The eggs develop inside and the salps give birth to live young that swim away and mature into asexual oozoids. Eventually, the entire chain transitions into males that release sperm to fertilize the eggs of neighboring female blastozoids.
These strange little jelly balls have an incredibly fast life cycle, reaching maturity in just 48 hours. It is believed that they the fastest growing multicellular animal on earthTheir body length increases by up to 10% per hour.
