1545684-605374569511884-297917879-n.jpg&

 
If you spotted a sea creature that was entirely transparent and seemed to possess no bones or eyes, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a rather odd sort of jellyfish. But if you look closely, you’ll see that the creatures known as salps are actually much more complex and no less fascinating organisms.

 

Made primarily of cellulose and found the world over, the Salpa maggiore (Salpa maxima) has internal organs and structures that jellyfish don’t have, such as a heart, vascular system and even gonads. In fact, juvenile salps have tails, gills, a primitive eye and backbone and a hollow, enlarged brain. The salp’s transparent appearance is a particularly effective form of camouflage, as the creatures often float at the surface to feed and they have no way to defend themselves against predators. 
 
Salps are highly successful animals that have existed for hundreds of millions of years and can be found in every ocean, feeding on microscopic plants or “phytoplankton”. When conditions are just right, phytoplankton populations can explode, resulting in “blooms” that stretch for miles across and change the very colour of the ocean. When salps find dense blooms like these, they feast until they actually clog up and sink to their deaths. But salps take advantage of the bonanza by quickly budding off clones of themselves, and these clones graze the phytoplankton and can grow at a rate that is faster than any other multicellular animal.
 
The salp population explodes into swarms of hundreds of millions of individuals, devouring even huge phytoplankton blooms. When the salps inevitably run out of food, millions starve and their population crashes back to normal levels. The billions of bodies of salps and their waste matter carry enormous amounts of carbon down to the sea floor, and scientists are trying to understand just how this affects the ocean’s carbon cycle and how this in turn could play a role in climate change.