unidentified jelly-like tube

Description and Comments

While snorkeling off Southwater Caye, Belize, last week, 3 of us saw 2 examples of a tube-shaped, translucent, jellyfish-like creature. They hardly seemed alive, remained intact when poked with a gloved hand (not by me), and looked to me more filmy than slippery jelly-like. The gloved person who poked them is an experienced diver and said they felt like a jellyfish (some sort of surface tension, I suppose). Shaped like a slipcover for a sea cucumber, they had no obvious tentacles, and we observed no inner organs or prey. They were floating near the surface but not on it, well above the reef at perhaps 20-30 feet of depth, and seemed to have no propelling motion. We were told they may have been "Venus's girdles," but they were rounded, not flat. Any ideas?

Author

gaillz

Type of organism

Other
A maybe jellyfish?

Quantity

2

Latitude

16.17

Longitude

-88.15

Comments

jellywatch Thu, 02/14/2013 - 11:44

This sounds like a salp. There are many variations, but mostly tube like and relatively firm. Venus girdle would be flat and so flimsy you would not even feel it if you tried to touch it. Maybe look online for salp pictures and let us know if this matches your perception?

gaillz Sat, 02/16/2013 - 18:54

I neglected to describe the size of these "items"--am still not sure they are creatures. They were much larger than the salps I could find online--perhaps about a foot or more in length, 2" in diameter. As I said, they looked like translucent slipcovers for sea cucumbers! One end was definitely rounded, like the end of an s.c., but I don't recall noting whether both ends were like that. And they didn't look as if they could be separated into individuals, like the salp chains I found.

???

gaillz Sun, 02/17/2013 - 09:34

Now that's more like it! We saw them during the day, so didn't get a chance at the bioluminescence (sadly)--but whoever you are, I think you've figured it out for us! I'll pass your suggestion on to the owner of the resort we were at, and perhaps she can get it to the snorkel-mistress who saw it with us, for verification.

Many thanks! I'll do some more online reading, as I'm interested in knowing why these things show up so rarely in the area we saw them, and why now two of them. Friends off on an exploratory journey, I suppose.

Thanks again.