After some Googling I found it is a Portuguese Man o' War and quickly messaged my friend warning her to give it a wide berth, because the tentacles you can se in the photo are highly venomous. and in fact the Portuguese Man o' War is seriously dangerous.
It has been quite windy and stormy there and the animal must unfortunately have been blown off course in the Atlantic and become stranded on the beach.
Actually, from my reading, I found it is not an animal but a siphonophore, a whole colony of animals referred to as zooids, each multicellular, and all genetically identical, but having specialised into different roles. One (or maybe some, I am not sure) forms a gas-filled bladder which acts as float for the whole colony. Other zooids form the venous tentacle which incapacitate other animals and presumably draw them back to the colony. A third type of zooid there digest them, and presumably share the nutrients, I don't know how.
Finally a fourth zooid is responsible for sexual reproduction.
In life the colony might have look a bit like my sketch.
There are many other surprising facts about this strange life-form. One I particularly like is the small fish that has evolved immunity to the venom and now lives with impunity amongst the tentacles feeding on any left-overs.
Portuguese Man o' War
A friend in Devon sent this photo yesterday.
After some Googling I found it is a Portuguese Man o' War and quickly messaged my friend warning her to give it a wide berth, because the tentacles you can se in the photo are highly venomous. and in fact the Portuguese Man o' War is seriously dangerous.
It has been quite windy and stormy there and the animal must unfortunately have been blown off course in the Atlantic and become stranded on the beach.
Actually, from my reading, I found it is not an animal but a siphonophore, a whole colony of animals referred to as zooids, each multicellular, and all genetically identical, but having specialised into different roles. One (or maybe some, I am not sure) forms a gas-filled bladder which acts as float for the whole colony. Other zooids form the venous tentacle which incapacitate other animals and presumably draw them back to the colony. A third type of zooid there digest them, and presumably share the nutrients, I don't know how.
Finally a fourth zooid is responsible for sexual reproduction.
In life the colony might have look a bit like my sketch.
There are many other surprising facts about this strange life-form. One I particularly like is the small fish that has evolved immunity to the venom and now lives with impunity amongst the tentacles feeding on any left-overs.