A diver had a highly unusual encounter off the coast of Las Palmas, the largest city in the Canary Islands. At a depth of eight metres, he came across an extraterrestrial being, a so-called pyrosome.
Javi Benavides was swimming off the coast of Las Palmas in June when he came across the pyrosome. His fascinating footage, only now published, shows the creature, also known as a fireroller and made up of thousands of tiny individual animals, moving with the currents of the sea (see video above).
“It was fascinating to see them”
“I’ve been a diver for over 20 years and this is only the second time I’ve come across a pyrosome,” Benavides said, describing his encounter with the creature. “It’s not something you see every day. It was fascinating to see them.”
Pyrosomes are free-swimming colonies of small organisms called zooids that are usually found in warm waters near the surface. Each zooid is only a few millimeters in size.
Pyrosomes can grow to twelve meters in length
The colonies are bell-shaped or thick-walled cylinders closed at one end. With a diameter of three to four centimetres, they usually reach a length of 15 to 20 centimetres. The largest species, called Pyrosoma spinosum, can in exceptional cases even reach twelve metres in length.
Colonies of this size have been found in the Indian Ocean. In the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the colonies, embedded in a kind of gelatinous mantle, reach a length of about one meter and a diameter of about ten centimeters.
Source: Krone
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