Siphonophore — Summary

Three thousand feet down where an unmanned vehicle probes the ocean like an endoscope, a sudden carnival float ripples into view: Siphonophore! The scientists all rotate toward the monitor, open-mouthed as shepherds at the hush of wings not grown for any air we know. Siphonophore. Free of all hard parts, including that nugget the self. Corporate being whose members are truly members— co-dependent, specialized as organs in a body, most made of clear gelatinous tissue through which, lurid as a sunrise, the digestive apparatus winds. Some species can reach 130 feet in length. They glow blue or green when disturbed— or fly to pieces, some so delicate a cone of light alone can shatter them. They’re almost impossible to collect. What do they tell us, these prodigies whose motion is a music, weightless & translucent as the dreams of birds? That life is a conversation matter is having with itself? That cooperation at the highest level is indistinguishable from genius? All are predators. Their apparitional tentilla wave or glow to lure prey—those so foolish as to possess central nervous systems—into the range of poisonous harpoons.