Portuguese man-of-war Physalia physalis

The BBC news site is reporting that Portuguese men-of-war have been washed up on beaches in Cornwall according to council officials. There have been sightings of 13 men-of-war at Portheras Cove in west Cornwall and others at Summerleaze and Widemouth beaches in north Cornwall.

The Portuguese man-of-war Physalia physalis is a remarkable kind of jellyfish known as a hydrozoan. The species has been found in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Sargasso Sea and floats on or near the surface of the water. It is actually a colony of 4 kinds of animals or polyps: a pneumatophore that acts as a gas-filled float; dactylozooids that form tentacles; gastrozooids that collect food; and gonozooids which produce sex cells for reproduction. The float also has a crest which acts a sail and in this way the colony is driven along by the wind. The tentacles are covered in powerful stinging cells known as nematocysts. The Portuguese man-of-war traps its food, mainly young fish and shrimps, in its tentacles and kills them with the nematocysts.

This is a glass model of a Portuguese man-of-war made in the 19th century. In the 1880s father and son Leopold Blaschka (1822-1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857-1939) ran a small workshop in Dresden, Germany. Initially they made costume jewellery and glass eyes for taxidermists and the blind. However, about 1863 they started to make exquisite glass models of marine invertebrates and these soon became their main business. At their height they had salesmen working across Europe and North America and as far afield as Japan and India. By 1888 the Blaschka sales catalogue listed over 700 different models. Sea creatures are extremely difficult to preserve in their natural colourful state and thus the lifelike models were in great demand by museums and private collectors. The firm went on to make an extensive range of glass models of plants but when Rudolf died in 1939 there was no one to carry on the business and production ceased.