Species introCountry intro
Purple Tide?!
All of the ocean beaches I visited yesterday were covered at the tide line by an odd purple crust. At first I thought it was plant in origin, but looking it up, it was actually a mass stranding of giant rafts of tiny sea creatures. They can get much bigger, but these colonies were made up of very small, probably around 1cm, animals and I'm guessing they were blown ashore during the big storm we had last week. They were mostly dried up (thankfully - as the moist areas were rather stinky) and large pieces of the mat were starting to peel up and blow around.
''Velella'' is a cosmopolitan genus of free-floating hydrozoans that live on the surface of the open ocean. There is only one known species, ''Velella velella'', in the genus. ''Velella velella'' is commonly known by the names sea raft, by-the-wind sailor, purple sail, little sail, or simply ''Velella''.
These small cnidarians are part of a specialised ocean surface community that includes the better-known cnidarian siphonophore, the Portuguese man o' war. Specialized predatory gastropod.. more
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