Underwater Archaeologists capture one of the rarest creatures on earth, a Siphonophore

A group of marine biologists were in for an unexpected surprise when a deep sea expedition led to a close encounter with one of the ocean depth’s rarest creatures. When exploring the ocean bed in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists from the Nautilus Live team came across an extremely rare purple species of siphonophore. Although the creature may look on the surface like an elongated jellyfish, each species is in fact not just one organism but a colony of individual organisms that are connected together. Each of these tiny organisms, or zooids, has a highly specialised function within the colony to ensure that the siphonophore can move, eat and breathe.