The Aliens Have Landed!

A Strange Creature on the Beach...

I went for a walk along the shore with my son last weekend, and we stumbled upon this strange blue “thing” washed up on the sand. It looks a bit like some sort of alien spacecraft, don’t you think? But don’t panic – aliens haven’t invaded the west coast of Scotland (that I know of, anyway...!)

This is a By-The-Wind Sailor (Velella velella), a type of free-floating creature known as a colonial hydroid, that lives on the surface of the open ocean. They belong to the phylum Cnidaria, which also contains jellyfish, sea anemones and corals. While it looks like one individual, it is actually made up of a colony of many tiny animals.

This is quite a fresh specimen as it still has its beautiful blue colour; they turn transparent and papery when they die and dry out. They can be up to 10cm long and when alive, have short tentacles that hang downwards. They drift about in large groups, using these dangly tentacles to capture their planktonic prey.

By-The-Wind Sailors can’t control their direction of travel, and instead are at the mercy of the winds and currents. This means that if the wind is blowing in the right (or wrong?!) direction, huge numbers of them may be washed up on the shore. They can be either left- or right-sailed, and tend to end up sorted into two groups by the wind, depending on which way the sail on their back goes. Because of the prevailing winds in different parts of the world, left-sailed ones are usually found in the Northern Hemisphere, while right-sailed ones usually occur in the Southern Hemisphere.

This is only the second one I’ve ever seen, so it was quite an exciting find.

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In other news, school started back yesterday after the summer holidays. My son didn’t manage to go yesterday though, as the ferry had broken down! He didn’t seem particularly upset about this... I hope everyone has a good weekend; it’s the annual Vegetable Show here tomorrow so I’m off to polish some hopefully-prize-winning beetroot now!

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