Somewhere a mile down in the Gulf of California, a see-through string with stretchy orange stomachs has been minding its own business for who knows how long. Last month, scientists finally gave it a name. Welcome to Wacky Wednesday, where the ocean is weirder than your last dive buddy, and that’s saying something.
Two new species walk into a midwater
In October 2026, researchers from MBARI (the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute), the University of Gdańsk, New York University and Yale described two siphonophores that nobody had ever formally named: Bargmannia marlena and Bargmannia pyrosa. The paper landed in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Here’s the cast:
- Bargmannia marlena comes with stretchy orange stomachs. MBARI’s robots filmed one at about 1,113 meters (3,652 feet) in the Gulf of California.
- Bargmannia pyrosa has a fiery red body, which explains the name. One was filmed at about 1,696 meters (5,564 feet), also in the Gulf of California.
The team found seven Bargmannia species in MBARI’s video archive and an eighth in museum collections. Those eight species split into two evolutionary lineages, and the species are stacked by depth. They overlap on the map, but not on the elevator. Turns out the deep ocean has floors, and these animals pick theirs.
Wait, what is a siphonophore?
Short answer: a group project that actually works.
A siphonophore isn’t one animal in the usual sense. NOAA describes it as a colony of specialized, genetically identical individuals called zooids. They’re clones. Some zooids swim, some catch food, some digest it, some handle reproduction, and they all work together as one body.
Guinness World Records puts it even more bluntly: none of the zooids can survive separated from the colony. Think of a dive boat where the captain, the cook, the divemaster and the guy who fills tanks are all literally attached to each other at the hip. Forever. No days off. No complaining. Okay, so it’s nothing like a dive boat.
Siphonophores are cnidarians, so they’re related to jellies and corals. According to MBARI, they’re some of the most dominant predators in the midwater, the huge stretch of open water between the surface and the seafloor.
Bargmannia are the sports cars of the group. MBARI calls them among the most streamlined siphonophores, propelled by dozens of swimming bells that jet in unison. Dozens of clones, pumping in sync, in the dark. If that’s not a Wednesday, I don’t know what is.
The museum jar that talked
My favorite part of this study isn’t the new species. It’s the jar.
Deep-sea animals like these are fragile, gooey and a nightmare to collect. So the team combined three things: physical features of museum specimens, habitat data from underwater robot observations, and DNA sequencing. They even pulled DNA from a historical museum specimen that had been preserved in formalin.
If you’ve ever smelled formalin, you know it’s not exactly a preservation method that says “please, study my genes later.” Getting usable DNA out of it is the scientific version of finding your car keys in a lake. MBARI says this combined approach cleared up old naming mix-ups that had been hiding how many species actually exist.
Myth: “The Portuguese man o’ war is a jellyfish”
Nope. Every summer somebody posts a photo of a blue balloon on the beach with the caption “huge jellyfish!!!” and every summer a marine biologist sighs.
The Portuguese man o’ war (Physalia physalis) is a siphonophore, a cousin of our new deep-sea friends. NOAA says it’s a colony with four kinds of specialized parts that handle floating, catching prey, feeding and reproduction. It has no engine at all. It goes wherever the wind and currents push it, sometimes in groups of 1,000 or more.
The tentacles average about 10 meters (around 30 feet) and can stretch to about 30 meters (around 100 feet). They’re loaded with nematocysts, tiny stinging capsules that paralyze small fish and crustaceans. NOAA notes the sting is rarely deadly to people but hurts and leaves welts.
And here’s the bit that should be on a sign at every beach: a man o’ war can still sting you weeks after it washes ashore. Dead-looking doesn’t mean done. Same rule I’d give you on any reef: if you didn’t drop it, don’t pick it up. (Yes, Captain Clutchy, this means you.)
Myth: “The blue whale is the longest animal ever”
Mostly true, with a giant, stringy asterisk.
In March 2020, Schmidt Ocean Institute’s ROV SuBastian filmed a giant siphonophore, Apolemia, in the deep canyons off Ningaloo, Western Australia. It was coiled in a spiral. Guinness says the outer ring alone was estimated at around 47 meters (154 feet), and the total length at up to 119 meters (390 feet). Schmidt Ocean Institute called it “seemingly the longest animal ever recorded.”
The asterisk:
- It’s an estimate. Nobody unrolled it with a tape measure. The spiral shape, the size and the movement made a real measurement impossible.
- It’s a colony, not a single animal in the way a whale is. So whether it “beats” the blue whale depends on how strict your definition of “an animal” is.
- Normal-sized Apolemia uvaria colonies are usually no more than about 3 meters (10 feet), according to Guinness. This one was an outlier.
Its common nickname, by the way, is the “long stringy stingy thingy.” Science is very serious. Mostly.
Why should divers care?
You’ll probably never see a Bargmannia on a recreational dive. They live far below the 40 meter (130 foot) recreational limit, and that’s fine. Leave the deep stuff to the robots.
But siphonophores aren’t only a deep-sea thing. The man o’ war floats right at the surface, which is exactly where you are during a surface swim, a safety stop drift or a shore entry. A few practical takeaways:
- Respect the floaters. If the boat crew mentions men o’ war, listen. Those tentacles hang a long way below that cute little balloon.
- Beach finds are not souvenirs. Remember the weeks-later sting.
- Don’t trust your eyes on gelatinous stuff. Many of these animals are nearly invisible. Exposure protection helps on warm-water dives too. I wear a skin suit, and if the jellies are active, like after a big storm, I add a very light hoodie. It’s not a fashion statement. It’s a no-stinging-on-my-cheeks statement.
If you want more glowing, gooey, deeply weird ocean life, check out the Yeti crab, the hydrothermal hunk of the deep, the Dumbo octopus, and the bioluminescent fairy rings. And before your next trip, read Stop Touching Stuff, Captain Clutchy. It’s relevant. Painfully.
The bottom line
Two new species, a formalin jar that gave up its secrets, and a reminder that the biggest habitat on the planet is still mostly unexplored. MBARI says its research has contributed to more than 300 new species discoveries, and there are clearly more stringy stingy thingies waiting for names.
Your homework: next time someone calls a man o’ war a jellyfish, correct them. Politely. Then walk away before they ask what a zooid is.
Seen a man o’ war on a dive or on the beach? Tell me about it in the comments.
Sources
- MBARI, “New research reveals the hidden diversity of deep-sea siphonophores” (Oct 22, 2026): https://www.mbari.org/news/new-research-reveals-the-hidden-diversity-of-deep-sea-siphonophores/
- Mańko, M.K., S.H. Church, D.A. Ramirez, S.H.D. Haddock and C.W. Dunn (2026). Integrating mitogenomes, morphology, and ecology reveals depth-structured diversification and two new species of deep-sea Bargmannia siphonophores (Cnidaria: Hydrozoa). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 208(2): zlag150. https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlag150
- NOAA National Ocean Service, “What is a Portuguese Man o’ War?”: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/portuguese-man-o-war.html
- Schmidt Ocean Institute, “New Species Discovered During Exploration of Abyssal Deep-Sea Canyons off Ningaloo” (Apr 9, 2020): https://schmidtocean.org/new-species-discovered-during-exploration-of-abyssal-deep-sea-canyons-off-ningaloo/
- Guinness World Records, “Longest siphonophore”: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/500063-longest-siphonophore
