 Good morning, John. It was a year ago that I decided that I wanted to do a full year where every month I made a video about a different weird animal here on the vlog with this channel. For every one of those weird animals, we'd make a pin, and people would be able to sign up and get those pins as I made the videos, and we'd call it the Bizarre Beasts Pin Club, and this is the twelfth one of those. I really loved this little project inside a project, and we conclude with an animal that is not an animal. So, John, do you remember the time when we were kids at the beach and there was a dead Portuguese Manowar, and I stepped on it and I was in Payton for a full day? Well, because of that, I have kind of always assumed that these animals were fairly well understood, as they are common, they impact people, and they are weird enough that we probably would have spent lots of time looking. And our lack of understanding of Portuguese Manowar isn't really down to a lack of curiosity. It's down to a lack of, uh, sense. They're just very confusing. A Portuguese Manowar, for example, is not an animal. It is four animals. This is upsetting. What do you mean, Hank? Somehow, four genetically distinct animals with their own nervous systems have combined together to create a single colonial organism. One of them is the stomach, one of them is the gonads, one of them is the floaty part, and one of them is the tentacle part. Basically, there's overlap. How much overlap? We don't know. How does that overlap function? How does an animal exist with four different nervous systems? And how do those nervous systems communicate with each other? We don't know. This is not how it's supposed to work. But life isn't supposed to work in any particular way. It's supposed to work in the way that works. And the Portuguese Manowar as a colonial siphonophore works. Even if, while researching this video, it forced me to read sentences like, As the organism grows and the nematisacus expands anteriorly, new tentacular palpons grow at the base of the original gastrozoids. And these animals are beautiful. Well, okay, sorry. These colonial organisms are beautiful. They're also kind of terrible, of course. They're predators. They send out their stinging tentacles up to 165 feet. Some fish, however, have evolved to be able to carefully avoid those tentacles or have some imperviousness to them, which allows them to use the tentacles of the Portuguese Manowar as shelter from larger predator fish. And one species of fish actually has figured out how to live there and feed on the Portuguese Manowar. These organisms are named for the sailing ships that they very roughly resemble. And they do sail. The floaty bit has a sail on the end of it, and that's designed to have the wind push the Manowar so that its tentacles stretch out behind it. Otherwise, the Manowar would have to swim away from its tentacles, wasting energy. They're so good at catching fish that large colonies can actually deplete fisheries and the gas inside of their little bubbles, 14% carbon monoxide. So that also could kill you, though you would have to cut it open and breathe it in a lot, which would be just questionable, questionable decision-making. The variety of ways that evolution has figured out how to have an organism survive actually does astound me. It really does. This has been such a fun project, and I've enjoyed so much getting a new pin in my mailbox every month, along with it. And I've also felt kind of limited by the 4 minute time limit of Vlogbrothers because, like, there's a lot to say about these animals. So, so, I'm not ending it. And I would like to announce YouTube.com slash Bizarre Beasts, a new YouTube channel that you can go subscribe to right now. It is a thing that I love to do, and I want you to follow me over to Bizarre Beasts where I'll be co-hosting with Sarah Suda. In one episode about a weird animal every month, and we will be continuing the Pin Club as well, and opening subscriptions to more people right now if you want to sign up. I think that I can have the link to the Pin Club and the channel and the trailer all right here. John, I'll see you on Tuesday. Tentacular Palpons!