Name: Salpa (Salpa fusiformis)
Habitat: Widely distributed in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Diet: Phytoplankton and other things small enough to get caught in feeding nets
Why they're awesome: Often referred to as “jelly balls” or “buckets of snot,” these marine creatures have a transparent, gelatinous texture.
There are over 70 species of salps worldwide, with Salpa fusiformis being the most common. Salps live from the ocean's surface down to depths of about 2,600 feet (800 meters). They are barrel-shaped and measure just 0.08 inches (0.2 centimeters) when born, growing to about 4 inches (10 centimeters) as adults. They form long chains that drift through the ocean with the tides.
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Salps can also move forward by jet propulsion. They use bands of muscle that encircle their bodies to pump seawater through their bodies. As the water is forced through their bodies and out the back, food is collected and the salp moves forward. For this reason, salps belong to a group called “squirts.”
Salps move by expelling water from their anus. (Image credit: Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Unlike jellyfish, salps lack nematocysts and feed primarily on phytoplankton, but also filter everything they catch through an internal feeding net made of sticky mucus.
Salps play a key role in the fight against climate change (CO2) because they filter large amounts of water; a salp colony covering 38,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers) can capture up to 4,000 tonnes of CO2 overnight.
Adult salps go through two distinct stages: asexual ovarian and sexual germinal. When the asexual ovarian is ready to reproduce, it produces a long chain of salps, each of which is a clone of itself. These salps then develop into germinals that reproduce sexually. At first the entire chain is made up of females, each of which lays eggs that are fertilized by a nearby male germinal. The eggs develop internally and the salp gives birth to live larvae that swim away and become asexual ovarian adults. Eventually the entire chain transforms into a male, releasing sperm to fertilize the eggs of nearby female germinals.
These strange little jelly-like spheres have an incredibly fast life cycle, reaching maturity in just 48 hours, and are thought to be the fastest growing multicellular animals on Earth, growing in length by up to 10% per hour.
