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Our body is made up of trillions of individual cells, all performing specific functions of their own, but cooperating and working in harmony to create you – a single unique individual. In a sense, you have two levels of organisation – the cellular and the animal.
 
Imagine then, a bizarre single creature that is not only composed of billions of cells but also of hundreds of animals. The Ocean Dandelion is just such a creature and it challenges some of our basic assumptions about life and what an animal actually is.
 
Ocean Dandelions belong to the family of sea creatures known as siphonophores and are distantly related to the Portuguese Man O’War. Each Dandelion functions much like an ocean-going” ant colony” that is composed of hundreds of individual animals. Like the cells of your body, each animal within it performs a specific function such as protection or food-gathering, and together they work to create a kind of “super-organism”.
 
But unlike an ant colony that’s formed of many individual ants that remain physically separate from one another, the animals that makeup Ocean Dandelions take things one step further in that they share connective tissue, such as a communal stomach. This means that any food eaten by one animal is actually digested by all of them. Stress, injury or rough handling can sometimes cause the dandelion to disintegrate or some individual animals to break off like petals from a flower. When this happens then they can survive on their own for a time, but cut off from the nourishment provided by the group, they eventually starve to death.
 
Besides their organisation and structure, not much else is known about Ocean dandelions, including what they eat or how they reproduce, so it’s clear that these beautiful, mysterious and delicate creatures will undoubtedly have much to teach us yet.