Some of the gelatinous creatures that wash onto Oregon’s beaches are salps. Though salps resemble jellyfish without tentacles, they belong to a group of animals known as tunicates, commonly called sea squirts. In their larval phase, tunicates possess a primitive backbone structure, making salps more closely related to people than to jellyfish. Stranger yet, we are closer kin to a salp with its rudimentary spinal column than we are to an octopus, an invertebrate mollusk that seems almost humanlike with its playful personality and its remarkable memory, curiosity, and problem-solving skills. Sometimes I stare at a blob of salp goo on the sand and let the bizarre fact that we are cousins in the same phylum bubble in my brain.
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As these gelatinous rocket scientists pilot their way through the sea sucking in water and expelling it, they filter the water for the tiny phytoplankton they eat. Salps are also considered plankton. Even though they are much larger than the microscopic organisms they consume, salps are carried by currents stronger than their jet-powered motion. The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos, meaning wandering. As salps wander the sea grazing on algae, they provide a gelatinous feast for fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and siphonophores like the Portuguese man o’ war.
The salps we see on the beach represent one part of a strange lifecycle that involves both solitary salps and salp aggregations. A solitary salp reproduces asexually by budding a chain of clones that create light. The individual salps in a luminous chain remain attached as they swim; these strands of glowing strangeness can stretch more than fifty feet. The chains of some species form complex shapes such as giant wheels, and even a double helix. Salps that are linked together communicate through electrical signals to synchronize their movements, and a chain of harmonized beings pulses brightly as it snakes or spins its way through the sea.
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When food is abundant, salps clone themselves extraordinarily fast. Their populations explode to take full advantage of the bounty; staggering numbers of salps gobble up vast blooms of algae. A single swarm of salp clones can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles. And because of the constant gene shuffling that comes with the sexual reproduction of salps, when the environment changes, some individuals have the genetics necessary to deal with the shifting conditions.
From the article:
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