Nature's Strangest: Meet the Wind-Powered Sea Monster with 100-Foot Tentacles

The Portuguese physalia (Physalia physalis) is named after 18th century sailing ships, as they are said to resemble a ship under full sail.

In the open sea, they look more like floating pink party balloons, trailing long blue ribbons.

The balloon part is a float filled with carbon monoxide that acts like a sail. It rises off the surface of the water and catches the breeze.

This is how the Portuguese physalia cross the ocean, sometimes in their thousands. They do not swim actively, but move only thanks to the wind.

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And they can be right-handed or left-handed, depending on how their sail is aligned with the wind direction.

Up close, they look a lot like jellyfish and have some things in common, including their painful stings.

Be careful if you see a pale-colored deflated balloon on a beach with blue strings attached. It is likely a dead Portuguese mane snail. It may lose its body color after death, but not the power of its sting.

The Portuguese physalia is a siphonophore, a relative of true jellyfish, as well as sea anemones and corals.

There are about 175 species of siphonophores. Some live on the sea floor, most swim in the depths and the Portuguese physalia is the only species that floats on the surface.

The uniqueness of siphonophores lies in the way they build their bodies. Like other animals, they begin life as a fertilized egg that develops into an embryo. After that, things get quite different.

For large animals, including humans, growth typically occurs by growing and transforming parts of their bodies into specialized tissues and organs that perform certain functions, such as digestion and reproduction.

Siphonophores don’t do this. Instead, they clone themselves to create smaller, genetically identical bodies.

Known as zooids, they group together in specific patterns to form a colony that makes up the siphonophore.

Among the many types of zooids, the four main ones are responsible for feeding, digestion, sexual intercourse, and biting.

A common misconception is that zooids are individual animals, as some resemble relatives that live solitary lives, such as the swimming medusae of jellyfish and the flower-like polyps of sea anemones.

But siphonophore zooids cannot survive alone. They depend on the colony.

Portuguese physalia are important elements of a little-known ecosystem called the pleuston, which exists at the interface between sea and air.

As they drift, they catch fish and fish larvae in their tentacles (see below), which can extend 30 m (nearly 100 ft), and paralyze their prey with venomous stings.

Other animals hunt Portuguese mangrove snails. A species of sea slug, sometimes called a blue dragon, eats the tentacles, then embeds the stingers in its skin and uses them for defense.

Blanket octopuses hunt for food and repel attackers by brandishing pieces of Portuguese mango tentacles.

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