Time for another strange animal you have probably never heard off! And this one is a cute new species from Japan...cute in a creepy kind of way!
Let's check it out:
As explained in the video, the creature you just witnessed was nicknamed as the skeleton panda sea squirt and was scientifically described as Clavelina ossipandae.
Interestingly the species was discovered thanks to pictures on the internet circulating since 2018 until it was formally described in a new paper only a few days ago!
An unidentified colonial ascidian called gaikotsu-panda-hoya in Japanese, literally meaning ‘skeleton panda ascidian,’ has been attracting SCUBA divers’ attention for the past few years since its strange appearance was introduced on the Internet by a diving shop in Kumejima Island, Japan. To confirm the taxonomic status of this species, fresh samples were collected from a diving point off the coast of Kumejima Island. Our morphological examination revealed that they represent a new species source
Chances are that like me you wonder what kind of animal this is. Well, it belongs to the class of Ascidiacea. Simply known as ascidians or sea squirts this is a class of invertebrate filter feeders. There are over 2300 species in this group which occurs all over the world. Here's a link to Wikipedia if you want to further educate yourself on Ascidians.
Now, back to the skeleton panda sea squirt. The species forms colonies of one to four zooids and individuals are about 1.5 cm (0.59 inches long). For now we know it occurs in the waters off the coast of the Japanese Kumejima Island, Japan, where both the original reports and the samples used to describe it were obtained.
I don't want you to bore you with semantics and chances are you don't care lol. Still, here's a link to the paper describing the species if you fancy reading more on the species.
As a sidenote, the clavelina genus has some other cool looking squirts like Clavelina picta:
Ok friends, how you enjoyed discovering yet another wonder if nature with me. See you soon with more! In the meantime, feel free to check the links below for more animal oddities !
More Strange Animal Stuff
If you enjoyed this post here are some more amazing creatures I have recently blogged about:
