Christmas Trees Beneath the Sea
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And we have a special holiday episode here for you today. It does concern Christmas trees of a sort. We have, of course, talked about Christmas trees plenty of times on Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the past. I think the most recent installment being an episode we did a couple of years back, Holiday Inventions, Christmas Tree Lights, Tinsel and Angels.

We've talked about Christmas trees in connection to sacred trees in the past, but today we're going to find our Christmas trees in an all-new location. We are going to venture beneath the sea. That's right. It's Yuletide in the deep today. Yes, deep down in the ocean, and in some cases deep in the ocean, where it's said that Cthulhu waits dreaming, but just maybe, maybe he's dreaming of a white Christmas.

He's dreaming of that Red Ryder BB gun. Yeah. So how'd we come around to Christmas trees under the sea? Well, credit where credit's due. We had a couple of lead-ins to this. One of the organisms we're going to cover here is one that was already on your radar and is also something that I've observed in the wild before.

And then another source of inspiration was a 2021 JSTOR Daily article by Sierra Garcia titled Meet the Christmas Tree Doppelgangers of the Sea. Now, obviously, with a title like that, you know, I'm going to give the post a second look. You know, doppelganger, of course, being the German double walker, the uncanny, sinister and perhaps doom harbingering duplication of self.

Christmas with its hidden depths of darkness seems a great place for such creatures to wander around. But of course, it's not about actual doppelgangers. It's about things in the ocean that may or may not resemble Christmas trees, depending on how much you want to see Christmas in them. You know, my daughter is two years old now, and so this is going to be her first Christmas.

Her first really conscious Christmas, the one that I think she's really going to be very aware of. And of course, at her age, I'm constantly thinking about like the recognition of objects because she likes to point to things and either ask what's that or to say what the thing she's pointing at is. And a lot of times it's not the thing she says it is, but you can see the resemblance. And so I'm constantly thinking about the minimum visual criteria to associate a shape or some kind of sight with.

with an object or a concept that she already has. And one of them now is Christmas trees. And so like, I'm wondering what kind of triangular thing this week, you know, she'll point out is that Christmas tree, um,

And we're sort of playing the same game now, aren't we? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you've got to call these organisms something, right? We've encountered examples of this before. You know, everything is an apple, according to Western explorers. Some version of an apple, be it pine or otherwise. Mm-hmm.

But, you know, on another level, all of this kind of connects with the ancient notion that we've discussed in the show before, the idea that if you look into the water, if you gaze deep into it, you're going to inevitably find twins of things that exist above the water. You're going to find lions of the sea, cows of the sea, and so much more. So maybe it's not all that off the mark anyway, that there are doppelgangers, Christmas tree doppelgangers in the deep.

because we have Christmas trees up here, so they must exist in the mirror realm beneath the waves.

That's right. Well, are you ready to kick things off with my example here? Yes, yes. This is a fun one. This is probably the one that's instantly coming to some folks' mind out there, especially folks who have done a little snorkeling and scuba diving. Well, we're going to start in the place you might expect for undersea Christmas trees, and that is James Cameron's Avatar from 2009. No, I was actually reading an article about this that

was linked in that JSTOR Daily you mentioned earlier. But this was a short article that was mainly just promoing a conference presentation, but it had some interesting behind-the-scenes details about the making of Avatar. It was called Of Plants in Film by Tanya Marion in The Botanical Artist 2015. And so it's talking about when Cameron was setting out to design the world of Avatar, he wanted to achieve some degree of biological plausibility

And the movie is set on a planet, actually I think it's supposed to be a moon, called Pandora, which he was originally imagining as a place with low light conditions and a toxic atmosphere. So it would have kind of different material pressures applying to the biosphere, maybe leading to different forms of life than we have here on Earth.

And so in trying to dream up these life forms, he consulted with a plant physiologist from UC Riverside named Jody Holt to help imagine the botany of the alien biosphere.

It's kind of interesting how the plants they dreamed up in some way resemble life forms that are found not on the surface of Earth, but underneath Earth's oceans. So the movie features in some scenes a type of large ground flora, I think within the sort of in-universe lore. They call it like a zoobotanical or something like that. It's sort of like an animal-plant combination. But whatever it is, it basically seems plant-formed.

It's a piece of large ground flora with spiral-shaped foliage. And in the universe of the movie, it's called Helicoradium spiralei.

And in the movie, we see that this plant has an unusual reaction to activity in its environment. When it is physically disturbed, these fanned out corkscrew shaped leaves rapidly recoil and fold up into almost nothingness. So you can be standing in the middle of a little grove of these things and suddenly they all fold up and you can see everything around you. It's a touch me not reflex. Yeah.

Very impressive effects in play here, particularly nice on the big screen and in 3D. You know, say what you will about the Avatar films, but there's a lot of fantastic biological world building going on in them. And this is a great example of one of the organisms that Cameron unleashes on us. Yeah.

And so it turns out this was one of the biological elements of the movie that was inspired by organisms that actually exist in nature, not so much a plant, but by an animal, the real animal called Spirobranchus giganteus or the Christmas tree worm. And that's the animal that I want to talk about for a minute here.

So, first of all, your mind, if it works like mine, might be looking in the wrong direction here. Because when I hear Christmas tree worm, for some reason to me, it sounds like the name of a pest animal that is named after the crop that it is most notorious for infesting and consuming. So, like the tobacco hornworm or the potato tuber worm, etc.

These are in reality both moth species that in their larval stages feed on nightshade plants like the ones in their names and other nightshade plants as well. But, you know, humans kind of have a sometimes a kind of economic agricultural mindset in interfacing with wildlife so they can sort of name animals after the crop that that animal is causing them problems with. Yeah, it's like Christmas tree worms have ravaged the...

The harvest, again, is going to be a tough winter. Exactly. But the Christmas tree worm is not a caterpillar that infests Christmas tree farms. Instead, it is a marine tube worm that lives on the surface of coral reefs. And so what's the association? Well, these animals are named after Christmas trees because they look like Christmas trees.

And yeah, sometimes these naming conventions are a bit of a stretch, but for my part, I think it's close enough. I think these worms really do kind of remind me of Christmas trees, though I will qualify that. And my qualification is that it's not so much that they resemble the actual species of evergreens, which are usually fir trees that we use as Christmas decorations.

The only way in which I'd say they actually evoke the trees themselves is in general shape. So like Christmas trees, the part of these worms you can see is a cone, which is widest at the base and then narrows toward the top. And it does sort of have branches, branches radiating from a central trunk or spine. They're also sort of

needly branches, which you could compare to evergreen pine needle texture, but it's not exactly a perfect match when you look at it. Instead, I think the main way that they remind me and remind other people of Christmas trees is that they mimic a popular style of Christmas tree decoration, especially from years past, which

which is that you would have a string of lights or a brightly colored garland wrapped around the tree in a spiral pattern. I've got a couple of examples for you to look at here, Rob. I don't really know that much about historical patterns of Christmas tree decoration, but this reads to me as a more old-style way of decorating a Christmas tree. I associate it with like the 1930s or 40s. Yeah, yeah, and I guess maybe some of this survived. I don't know. I'm

Looking at this, I'm not sure when this style of tree decoration dies out or then again resurges again.

Um, for that matter, I'm not sure where we are now. Uh, we, we don't put a tremendous amount of thought into it. We just throw up the tree and we put our, you know, our, our favorite decorations up and, um, and call it a day. Yeah. Yeah. My family never had a spiral garland on our tree. So it's, it's not something I remember from personal experience. I feel like I've seen it in older media, which is maybe why I think of it as something that's older.

We might have had a spiral garland, or maybe my grandmother did. I don't remember, but it feels like something I've seen in my lifetime somewhere.

It's hard to get excited about the garland, though, especially as a kid, because it's the individual ornaments and the lights that have all of the personality. I think especially for people with brains like yours and mine, I think you and I were both like the illustrated dictionary kind of kids. We like things with lots of little individual entries, with a little illustration and explanation. And that's kind of what the individual ornaments feel like to me. I like individual ornaments with personality. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good way of putting it.

But coming back to the Christmas tree worm. So if you do a search for pictures of this worm, you will find plenty of stunning underwater photos of coral reef surfaces speckled with multicolored pairs of spiral Christmas trees.

Each pair branching in a fork. So what you'll see are two little Christmas trees right beside one another with the same coloration. Now, each pair has a different coloration from the other ones around it. But within the pair, the two little trees next to each other that are growing in a V shape split at the base, those will be the same color usually.

And one important thing to emphasize is that the Christmas trees that you're seeing are not the whole of the organism. Each pair of Christmas trees represents the two crowns or feeding and breathing appendages of a worm, the main cylindrical body of which is hidden in a tube in the coral right beneath where the trees emerge. And.

And whether or not you think they look like Christmas trees, these things are beautiful. I know they're, uh, they're especially popular as a, a site for like scuba divers and snorkelers. Yeah. I've gotten to observe these in the wild before snorkeling in Belize and in Roatan. Uh,

They're one of the smaller pleasures of snorkeling in the shallows. And honestly, that's what I'm all about when it comes to snorkeling. I don't really want to see anything big, you know, unless it's like a big, you know, coral formation. I mean, if I see a bigger fish, it's neat. But I often spend my time looking around for those little details, things that are, you know, curling about inside the reefs and the rocks.

And, you know, I think that's one of the things that makes something like a Christmas tree worm special. Now, in terms of whether they look like Christmas trees, I don't know. Obviously, it's one of those things where I knew what they were called, but as they were pointed out to me. So I couldn't help but bring Christmas tree into the scenario. But the ones I remember looking at, I tended to think more of like bristle cleaner for straws and tubes, you know.

But gorgeously decorated. Yeah, like I don't remember them being the ones I saw, mind you, as colorful as the ones I see in some of these photos. But on the other hand, underwater photography is very much a lighting game. I mean, I guess all photography

Photography is a lighting game. And, you know, what you actually see with your own eyes and maybe less than optimal lighting conditions in the water, you know, they're not going to necessarily match up with what you see, you know, in somebody's showcase of underwater photography. But yeah, they still they do have a lot of character. You know, there's something sneaky and whimsical about photography.

them. A lot of the things in the water don't want to be seen and will do what they can passively or actively to avoid a clumsy human in a mask and a snorkel from seeing them. But Christmas tree worms tend to feel just a little extra cheeky in the way they hide from us. Like they're not just hiding from you. They're almost kind of playing peekaboo, maybe playing hard to get. Yeah, there is like a peekaboo feel to them, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I was reading some guides to marine life and coral reef life that were talking about people who try to get photos of these things. And apparently they're somewhat they're sensitive to multiple things, including changes in light conditions. So maybe if a shadow falls under them, they could retract or the if the flash of a camera goes off, they could retract.

And then slowly over time, after they retract, they'll sort of reemerge. And so I think there might be some patience involved in trying to get up close and see them or to take a good photo of them to kind of wait for them to come back out after you have spooked them the first time. But then another thing I saw in one of the sources I was reading was that

How skittish they are might well depend on their surroundings, like the ones that are in shallower, more turbulent waters, I think tend to be a little less skittish than the ones that are in deeper, more calm and stable waters, which sort of makes sense. Yeah.

But anyway, okay, so what's the biological rundown on the Christmas tree worm? It is a relatively small polychaete worm that lives the entirety of its adult life with the majority of its body hidden inside a calcareous tube that it makes initially on the surface of a rock or more often a coral reef.

And then the tube can kind of become subsumed within the coral as the coral grows. And then the worm and its tube grows up along with the coral.

So it begins life in a short planktonic larval phase floating around, after which it lands somewhere on the reef, secretes a tube made of mucus, which it lives in for a bit. And over time, that mucus tube becomes cemented with solid minerals. And then within that tube, the Christmas tree worm metamorphoses and grows into its adult form where it will live the rest of its life. Yeah.

growing with the structure of the reef, safe and secure, and covered inside its tube by a nice lubricating blanket of mucus.

I've seen different estimates on size range. According to a post by the NOAA, on average, these worms are less than four centimeters long. But according to marine biologist Eugene Kaplan in his book, A Field Guide to Coral Reefs from 1999, their body length can reach up to 12 centimeters or about five inches. Either way, they are small, but they're easy to spot.

because they're very colorful and in some cases because of rapid changes that you can observe with them, most often them disappearing suddenly. So the exposed parts, the two Christmas trees, are two tentacles or crowns, and I've also seen them called gill plumes, arranged in a spiral or whorl pattern, which themselves contain what's called a bipennate arrangement of

of hair-like or needle-like protrusions called radials. And then those little needle protrusions are themselves perpendicularly covered in other smaller protrusions called pineals or cilia. So you can imagine a kind of fern shape. You have the main stalk going out and then you have branches going out from that stalk and then out from the branches you've got the little leaves projecting at a 90 degree angle. Yeah.

So these radials covered in the cilia, the worm fans them out in this spiral pattern and then beats them in the water to catch floating phytoplankton and other bits of biological particle matter that will become the worm's food.

The little pins sort of they catch hold of bits of organic stuff suspended in the water and then they sort of transport those particles in a stream in little ridges along the surface of the whorls down to the worm's mouth. Delicious. So imagine kind of a spiral Christmas tree that gradually sucks in all of its ornaments, sucks the ornaments down the branches and then down the trunk and eats them. I mean, it sometimes works like that if you have a cat in your Christmas tree.

Now, these structures are not only for filter feeding, they're also for breathing. They are the worm's gills. And so the worm uses these these radials to extract dissolved oxygen from the water.

Now, the activity that makes the Christmas tree worm notable as an inspiration for the plants in Avatar is the touch-me-not reflex. You know, when it senses danger through multiple types of stimuli, it can rapidly retract its two Christmas trees into the hole where it lives. And on top of that, it can also shut the door behind it. It has a flat body structure, sometimes capped with some sort of horny surface.

called an operculum, which it can slam shut over the opening of its tube. And we've talked about this adaptation, the operculum, in other species such as snails. Snails sometimes have an operculum that they can use to cover the opening of their shell. It serves the same purpose, but of course in the case of a snail, the shell is mobile. Here we'd be talking about a stationary tube on a substrate for a sedentary organism.

We also talked about it in our episodes on hermit crabs because in some cases the hermit crab will have one claw that is so made that it functions as an operculum at the opening of the shell. That's right. It's a perfect little lid for their shell. That's right. So the operculum is a biological adaptation for slamming the door shut.

Now, I wanted to shout out an interesting sort of ecological fact that I became aware of because I saw it in a PBS Nova segment. So thank you, Nova. But the interesting thing is that there is some evidence that the relationship between the Christmas tree worm and

And the coral reef on which it lives goes both ways. Now, of course, you can see how the worm benefits. The worm benefits from the coral skeletal structure, which of course provides it rigid protection against predators and the tube it can live in. But also as it grows, it lifts it up into the water where it can have access to better waters for filter feeding.

But the coral itself may also benefit from having Christmas tree worms all over it, because apparently the Christmas tree worms can provide a kind of protection for the coral against one of the coral's major predators. And that predator is the crown of thorns starfish.

a.k.a. Achanthaster Plancy or Plunky? P-L-A-N-C-I. But I'll just say Crown of Thorns Starfish because, boy, is the epicness of that name appropriate. So imagine kind of a cross between a giant sunflower and an ironclad

an Iron Maiden turned inside out. These things are absolutely from the Hellraiser universe, extremely wicked. They're large. They might be roughly a foot and a half in diameter on average, coated in spikes, and

And what they do is they crawl over the surface of the coral reef, just mowing. They're just mowing the lawn, eating everything they can. According to that NOVA segment, these giant starfish are in part responsible for the major decline of living coral within the Great Barrier Reef. There are other factors at work as well. But when these things get going, a sort of explosion in the population of these coral predators can clean out a reef of living corals.

And so the whole ventral surface, the underside of the starfish, you can kind of think of as a vast digestive organ complex containing tube feet and this averted stomach, inside-out stomach system. So it's just the underside of it is for eat. It's just going to devour the coral underneath. And it turns out there's some evidence that

And that if it comes to a part of a coral reef where there are Christmas tree worms, the Christmas tree worms can protect the corals directly underneath them because they get in the way of the starfish feeding. And in fact, they irritate the starfishes feeding organs. I've looked up a paper. So I was trying to find the paper that was the source of this observation. And.

And I found one published in the Marine Ecology Progress series from 1986 by DeVantier et al.,

And I was looking for the part of the paper that describes exactly how this works. I found it in their results section where they say, quote,

induces retraction followed by almost immediate reappearance with the operculum and bronchial crowns pushing against the tube feet and arms of the starfish. This caused the predator to move quickly away. So something about what these worms like poking it at their tube feet and the averted stomach, it

The starfish do not like the worms messing with them. And so this can have the effect of protecting the corals that are situated right around where the worms are. And so it's not going to protect the reef totally from being mowed by the starfish at

But what it can do is make sure that some corals are left alive on the reef and that those corals left alive around the worms, protected by the worms, can reseed the rest of the reef structure with living coral once again. Fascinating. So they're holding down their turf, which could allow the overall reef to then grow and heal later. Yes. Fascinating.

So I don't know. We've been thinking about trees a lot lately as apotropaic magic. Is there something here protective kind of, you know, the coral reef has got its own protective amulet, except I guess it's not magic. It's just like literally keeping the starfish from absolutely devouring every inch of its life. It would be like if your Christmas tree protected your house

by coming alive in the night and fighting, you know, weird alpine demons that might venture into your home. Yeah, it's like if aliens wanted to come over your house and suck all of the people out of it, if the Christmas tree that you had, like, poked the alien ship and irritated it and made it go away. There you go. ♪

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So that does it for Christmas tree worms, but I know we had some other organisms we were going to talk about. That's right. This next one is one that I learned about in that JSTOR Daily post that I referenced earlier, and it's very much still in the world of coral, Christmas tree coral. A cold water black coral discovered apparently in the mid-2000s. Some of you may be wondering, well, what is a black coral? Like, what does this even mean?

Okay, well, you know, a reminder that generally, you know, corals, of course, are animals like we've been discussing. And if you've, you know, gotten out into the water, you're probably mostly familiar with the vibrant corals and, you know, sometimes the bleached corals in shallow coastal environments. But what are black corals? Well, as the NOAA article Black Corals of Hawaii by Anthony Montgomery points out,

Black corals or thorn corals, which are officially known as antipatharia, are found all over the world and at varying depths. So you don't have to go into the deep waters to find them, but they're often noted for their presence in deep sea environments. Despite their name, they are rarely actually black corals.

I'll get to why we still call them black corals in spite of this. But they can be various, even bright colors, and their shapes also vary wildly.

A key difference, however, between black corals and the stony corals that I think more people are familiar with is that black corals have a skeleton made of protein and chitin. This skeleton is black no matter what color the outer layers are, and that's the reason they end up with this name. So they have black skeletons, but they may have any number of colors on top of that skeleton. I see.

Now Montgomery in that NOAA article stresses that black corals do not have symbiotic algae associated with them, and they don't require light, thus their ability to survive at greater depths. And there are apparently something like 200 known species of black coral. Now the Christmas tree black coral in question here is a particular species, Antipathus dendocristos.

In nomine Patria. That's not part of it, but it sounds very Catholic, doesn't it? Dendro Christos. That's got to literally mean Christmas tree. Yeah, yeah. This is one. I'm going to get to another organism later where not everybody seems to be associated with Christmas as far as I can understand. But this one, it's right there in the official name. Okay.

According to environmental factors that influence the distribution size and biotic relationships of the Christmas tree coral, Antipathos dendrochristos, in the Southern California Bight by Huff et al., this is in Marine Ecology Progress Series 2013, the Christmas tree coral is an uncommon, long-lived colonial coral that typically supports a diverse population of marine lifeforms.

This, of course, is one of the reasons that there are a number of studies looking at it because there's a lot more to learn about them and a lot of organisms depend on them. But why do we call it a Christmas tree coral? What is even remotely Christmassy about it?

Well, while your mind may easily turn to an image of a green tree, you know, draped in silver tassels and multicolored lights, the Christmas tree it's named for is actually one of those artificially frosted, you know, white flocked Christmas trees. You know what I'm talking about. These are the ones where the idea is the tree is supposed to look like a frost covered tree in the forest. Very much in keeping with the movie Jack Frost, right?

that we watched for Weird House Cinema in which Jack Frost essentially like flocks the trees in the forest covering them with ice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that is what they're going for here. Joe, I included a photograph for you here. This is an image, I believe, from the Huff et al paper. Oh, I absolutely see the comparison. It looks very much like fir tree branches covered in snow. Yeah, it's not tree-shaped. It's not really conical. But yeah, it looks like fir tree branches that are completely covered in some sort of white frost.

Now, as the Huff et al. paper points out, Christmas tree corals also occur in red. But my first thought was like, well, it doesn't always look like a Christmas tree. But that shows how little I know about the history of flocking Christmas trees or creating, you know, plastic artificial trees. Because I easily found an image of like a flocked red Christmas tree where it just is like a bright red color.

imitation fir tree, I'm assuming here. And yeah, I mean, it does not look unlike an actual photograph of a red Christmas tree black coral. I'd see that. For some reason, this one made me think alveoli, just like, you know, a little red broccoli in the lungs. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another solid comparison. Yeah.

I also have to point out this one picture from the Huff et al paper that has the red, there's a red one and then there's a white one right behind it.

And on the red one, you see two different crustaceans climbing about. And to me, it looks like one of those, sometimes you see like a really wacky themed holiday tree, you know, where there's very much a particular theme in mind. It's not about just getting all of your favorite ornaments on there, but like making something that is very fashionable. And so I can imagine a tree where it's like your only two ornaments are two enormous crustaceans crawling about on the tree. Yeah.

Ho, ho, ho, LV-426. Yeah, that sort of thing.

So full-grown colonies of this particular form of black coral apparently reach heights of eight feet tall, and they can live more than a century if conditions are favorable. A 2007 Bulletin of Marine Science paper from Love et al. found that basically in this paper they discuss how they found a dead 2.1 meter or 6.8 feet tall Christmas tree black coral dead.

collected from 106 meter depth or 348 feet depth off the coast of Southern California. And this one they found to have been about 140 years old when it died.

And its skeleton was heavily colonized by invertebrates. According to this paper and this particular specimen, 2,554 species living there. Wow. Somebody counted all those species? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a lot. Now, you know, this is a dead one. But, you know, basically the idea here is that, you know, alive or dead, they die.

They have an important place in the ecosystem, you know, providing, you know, substrate and so forth for various other organisms to thrive. And of course, black corals, like other corals, are, you know, generally threatened by climate change and related human industrial level activities.

Uh, so, you know, it's any threat to them is of course, not only a threat to, to, um, uh, to this particular species, but then there's also all these cascading effects that can occur with all of the species that are then, uh, dependent upon it. Mm-hmm.

I was also reading about how the black in general, not with this particular species, the Christmas tree black coral, but black corals in general, they have at times been prized for medicinal uses and then also for jewelry making. And I believe in Hawaii, there's still a certain amount of black coral harvesting that is allowed, I think largely for jewelry making,

though perhaps there's some medicinal usage in there as well. In other areas, though, black corals, along with other forms of coral, are completely protected. And to be clear, there is some level of protection in Hawaii, based on what I was reading. It's just, I think there is some allowance for harvesting. So again, Christmas tree black corals, named for the Christmas tree. And, you know, I think it's not unreasonable to say, yes, they do kind of look like Christmas trees.

I was going to say, if you tried to make a Christmas tree, like harvest some, assuming you could, and ecological concerns aside, harvest some and make it the Christmas tree in your house, would it still look like a Christmas tree out of the water?

I'm not sure. I think, well, I mean, one of the things once you, with the black corals, it's like people were harvesting it and doing stuff with the black skeleton. So I don't know, you might end up with some sort of like, you know, goth black Christmas tree, which, you know, I'm also totally on board for. Do what you want with your Christmas trees. Make them a statement of your identity. Okay. What's our third underwater Christmas tree?

Okay, I had to do a little bit more digging for this one because I was like, all right, we really need something else for the episode. You've got to round it up with a third, right?

And for a little bit there, I was like, I think the third is going to be the Christmas tree of the desert. And then I had to remind myself, no, you can't do that. That's not deep sea. That's the opposite of deep sea. That's the desert. So I was beginning to think there wasn't going to be something. But then I started finding some references from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And that led me to a particular genus of siphonophore that we're going to talk about here. And that genus is Forscalia.

And this genus, I believe, is unofficially referred to as containing at least one variety of Christmas tree siphonophore. Okay, so what is a siphonophore? Well, a siphonophore is an order of colonial, free-swimming, or floating marine hydrozoines, such as the Portuguese Man of War. That's probably the most well-known member of this group.

And they're mostly delicate, transparent, various colors in play. And they are composed of zoids. Zoids that possess special functions such as feeding or locomotion. They're very strange. The Good Wizard recently discussed Man of Wars on Automalia Stupendium, an occasional Wednesday episode that we do. And in that episode,

We went into some of the details of what a cephalophonophore actually is. It is a colonial organism made up of genetically identical but highly specialized polyps.

So what you might mistake for a single organism's reproductive system, you know, or a digestive system, grasping arms, or the flotation bladder, are in fact individual zoids. And I have a way that I make sense of all this. And I'm going to adapt what is in that Animalia Stupendium episode for the holiday theme here. Okay. So imagine you're Santa Claus, and you need a reindeer to pull your sleigh this year. It's a common problem. Mm-hmm.

Unfortunately, all but one of your reindeer were killed last year by the bear spirit, Tumboq. So what are you going to do? You just got one. One can't pull the sleigh, right? Fortunately, you're Santa Claus. You have access to advanced cloning technology. So what can you do? Well, you could simply clone Blitzen a dozen times to produce a host of genetically identical reindeer to pull your sleigh. That would work, but you're Santa Claus. What if you aimed higher?

What if you instead formed each blitzen clone into a giant organ or organ system or, you know, or tissue or part of some sort of a greater organism? You know, one blitzen becomes the digestive system, another the reproductive system, another the skeletal and so forth, until you have a single uber blitzen, a colonial super deer organism composed of genetically engineered

identical individuals. Those individuals do not look like a deer. They look like parts of the greater thing that you associate as a single entity. Kind of Blitzen bio-Voltron. Yeah. Voltron is another way of thinking. Like, when you look at a Portuguese man of war, and when you look at any of these Siphonophores, you are looking at Voltrons. But,

Unlike Voltron, Voltron, of course, can come back apart into lions and fly about. That doesn't happen here. Like they're all part of the whole. There is no decoupling from the whole here. Interesting. There may be a better way of thinking about it. But yeah, I tend to think of it in this way. I think the Voltron way of understanding them is also pretty solid. So the Forscalia genus was first described in the 1800s. And the species in question here is Forscalia formosa.

first recorded by Keverstein and Ehlers in 1860.

Now, I am personally not certain if anyone other than the Monterey Bay Aquarium and perhaps their web team are calling this species the Christmas tree siphonophore. But even if they're the only ones, that's good enough for me because, A, they're a world-class institution, and, B, we needed one more Christmas tree to round out the podcast. I mean, I see it. Looking at a picture of this thing, it looks the most festively decorated.

I mean, talk about garlands. Yeah, yeah. There are some pictures of this on the Monterey Bay Aquarium's website. There's also some really nice video footage on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's YouTube page. Especially that video, I find, you look at it and you're like, yes, it looks like a Christmas tree. It's upside down, but it looks like a roughly Christmas tree-shaped array of branches with illumination.

Yeah, definitely. So it's kind of actually, I think, like the Christmas tree worm, where it's not so much that the crowns of the worm look really a lot like, you know, evergreen trees. They're sort of cone-shaped, generally shaped like a tree. But then the real thing is that decorating convention, the garland that you wrap around a tree like a spiral that resembles the...

the color tips of the spiral, the radials going up around the tentacles of the worm. In a similar fashion here, I would say that it's not so much that this looks like a Christmas tree as that it's roughly tree-shaped, and then it has these little white shining or glowing bits in the video you've seen, which makes me think of like the lights that we put on a Christmas tree. So again, it's kind of a decorating convention that I think really seals the aesthetic comparison.

Yeah. Now, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, these organisms live in the deep ocean, ranging from the surface down to 6,600 feet or 200 meters deep in the North Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. They reach sizes of up to 10 feet or 3 meters in length.

um, or height, depending on how you want to view it as a Christmas tree, I guess, um, subsisting on various small sea animals in those environments. And it moves through the water via a system of floats and swimming bells. Whether or not it looks like a Christmas tree to you, it is beautiful. That's right. But, you know, you could maybe, again, use this as inspiration for your own Christmas tree instead of ornaments this year, uh, you know, decorate your tree with Zoids. Uh, I don't know. Um,

No, no, no. In truth, I think you could technically do a theme tree based on all three of these organisms. Yeah.

It would be an impressive feat, and I guess it would be for a limited audience. But I don't know, maybe there's some marine biologists out there who really get into it. If you have ever decorated your Christmas tree to align with actual marine organisms named for Christmas trees or associated with Christmas trees, obviously we want to know about it. Oh, yes. I mean, it's not impossible. It's not impossible.

But I guess it's more likely there may be people with Christmas trees out there that have some sort of a science theme or even a marine biology or underwater oceanic theme. I would settle for that. I'm always game to look at pictures of somebody's Christmas tree. So by all means, send them in. Please do. All right. I think we're going to go ahead and wrap this episode up.

But hopefully this was a fun and surprisingly different holiday episode from us here. You know, in the past we've done again, you know, Christmas inventions, things that tie into like psychological or even philosophical ideas that are associated with the holidays. This time we went a little deeper.

In the oceanic sense. All I want for Christmas is to have my body exfoliated by a crown of thorns starfish. Yeah, those look pretty rough. Kind of like a whoopee cushion from hell. I guess, you know, sea stars in general have like a do not touch vibe. But these really have a do not touch vibe. Maybe we have to come back in the future and give them their own episode. I think, yeah, we could easily do an episode on thorns.

I mean, on starfish in general, you know, calling out various particular species of note. But yeah, maybe these guys too.

All right, we're going to wrap it up here then. But just a reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short-form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you want to follow us on Instagram, that's probably the best place to follow us these days. You can find us at stbympodcast.com.

And let's see, what else do we want to mention here? We should have a call out that we do have a merch store. If you want to check that out, there should be a link on the Instagram. You can also find a link at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Thank you.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

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