Despite their dour name (no one ever looked at something beautiful and named it salp), salps are fantastical creatures. If you dive deep enough, some salps even glow. On shore, they look like beads of clear Jell-O. But in water, they exist in pulsating chains that can curve like a snake or coil like a snail’s shell. These chains are made up of hundreds of identical salps joined hip to jiggly hip. Each clone is a distinct, barrel-shaped individual, yet all together the colony of clones makes up a single salp, attached and moving as one. Many chains can grow as long as 20 feet, drifting through
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