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Baffling Bluebottles

Physalia physalis which we have been using to ID the blueblottles found here does not exist here. Those are an animal that grows to 30 cm, a near full crest, and a large number of tentacles that can extend to 50 m and I am sure we will all agree that we have not seen anything that large in all of our bluebottle obs.

So what do we call ours? Well there seems to be four possible ID's for our ones.

Physalia utriculus (top left) has a single main fishing tentacle, a float with a high crest in the middle half of the float and long, cylindrical, tapering, posterior extension (right hand side). They can also have a bloated float.

Crested Bluebottle - Physalia sp1 (full crest) (top right) has one single main fishing tentacle, and a prominent crest along the full length of the float which does not stand up high like the Physalia utriculus crest, instead it shows more as ...more ↓

Posted on February 22, 2019 04:51 AM by tangatawhenua tangatawhenua | 0 comments | Leave a comment
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We know that the whole of the blue fleet landed in NZ Feb 2016 so this project is for recording other Blue Fleet critter sightings so we can monitor when the whole fleet lands again.

tangatawhenua created this project on October 8, 2017
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