Yesterday, when I was out snorkeling, I was spotted this entity hanging in the water. When I first saw it, I thought it might be a pyrosoma. I was lucky enough to see one of those last year, which I posted about here. Pyrosoma are colonies of many individual tunicates and this new sighting looked somewhat similar. But where that pyrosoma looked like a gelatinous tube with little purple dots in it, this tube was longer, thinner, and had much larger, and clearly visible, brown spots in it.
After some research, I’m pretty sure this is a chained salp. Like pyrosoma, chained salps are colonies of individuals. The individuals have a heart, gills and a spinal cord, which makes them quite advanced in evolutionary terms. They move around by pumping water through their bodies. When they form chains, the individuals in the chains communicate with electrical signals so the the chain moves in harmony.
Typically, salps are creatures of the open ocean, and not often seen in Hawaii, so I feel quite fortunate to have seen this one.
Graham's Island 
A new experience is always good 🙂
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Absolutely! I feel very fortunate to have seen this, and the pyrosoma before that, because they’re an oddity here.
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The ocean is full of wonders –
I sound like a cliché but it really is
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It’s one of the things I love about it. I never know what I’m going to see on any given day.
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Weird but it must be stronger than it looks if it lives in the open ocean.
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I think the bond is pretty strong until eventually they break up as part of their life cycles.
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