V. Lynne

With the aid of a gas-filled “float” at its center, the “blue button jelly” (Porpita porpita) drifts at the surface of tropical oceans around the world.

A distant cousin of the jellyfish, blue button jellies are actually hydroids, or colonial animals, made up of individual “zooids” that specialize in eating, stinging, or reproducing. Somehow, they manage to do all that in a beautiful 1-inch (2.2 cm) package!

📸 from the Liquid Jungle Lab in Panama by Kelly Rakow Sutherland © WHOI