… super painful sting etc etc. The point is, they’re siphonophores, and my lab lives and breathes to unearth the secrets of these strange animals. So I forwarded the email to my lab peeps, and then continued to nom me lunch while reading the New York Times online. Fast forward 45 minutes to Freya Goetz, our lab tech, rushing into the office asking, “So, are you coming!?”. While I had been reading all about stomach bacteria  and enjoying my sandwich, the rest of my lab had been in a frenzied email discussion about driving the 2 hours to get some Portuguese man o’ war. Right. Now.

So I put my snack away, dusted off my gear and 15 minutes later we were all pilled in my advisors car, ready to do what we do best, collect some futha fuckin siphonophores.

2 hours and some awesome nerd talk later, we landed in Woods Hole, MA, complete with the crowds of tourists and terrible traffic. We landed an awesome spot right by the dock, and wandered out to the ocean with all our buckets and cups on sticks in hand. Where we found all of… … … …  nothing. No Portuguese man o’ wars in sight. Fortunately  the folks at the Marine Biological Labs are all kinds of awesome, and they’d collected some for us just in case they’d blown away by the time we arrived.

Because these guys have a big blue float on top, they’re one of the few planktonic animals you can spot while driving, so after we loaded our MBL animals into the truck, we did some mobile looking too, just in case.

With no man-o-war spotted and the truck getting hot, we decided to head back to home base, and learn all about our new catch. Once in the lab, we set up our three man-o-war in an aquarium, to get a better look. Moving them from the bucket to the tank was no easy task.

The siph experts, then set off dissecting them, to better understand their anatomy and organization. But not before I got a quick video of these crazy, beautiful, creepy critters: