hectocotyli-everywhere:

nubbsgalore:

photos by matt smith from the Illawarra coast in new south wales of bluebottles. despite its resemblance to the jellyfish, the bluebottle is more closely related to coral. known as a zooid, the bluebottle (or portugese man of war) is a colonial animal composed of many highly specialized and physiologically integrated individual organisms incapable of independent survival.

notes matt, “despite their potentially dangerous sting, the bluebottle is an amazingly beautiful creature. with strong winds, hundreds of these cnidaria are blown into the bays around my home town and trapped overnight.” this allows him to capture the above shots, which he creates with use of a fluorescent tube in his strobe light and a homemade waterproof lens dome.

Not only are they incredibly aesthetic they’re also damn interesting. I once decribed them as “basically an angry colony of Cnidarian nano-polyps jacked up on performance-enhancement drugs” as well as “a  venomous forest of hive-minded hydroid motherfuckers”, and I still don’t see how any of this would be inaccurate.