‘Weird’ gelatinous creature shaped ‘like a party balloon’ is a new species, NOAA says

Reports of a “weird” creature shaped like a party balloon in waters off Puerto Rico have led to the discovery of a new marine species, according to NOAA Fisheries.

The “gelatinous animal” — seen 2.5 miles down in a sea floor canyon — is a new type of comb jelly, an ancient creature that has drifted the world’s “seas for at least 500 million years,” Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History reports.

NOAA announced the discovery in a Nov. 20 press release that included video of the creature pulsating “a prism kind of light effect” as it moved.

“I thought: that is so weird looking,” NOAA zoologist Allen Collins says in a video posted on Facebook. “It’s like a party balloon, only instead of sort of having one string hanging down, it’s got two little dangly bits.”

Scientists encountered the creature in April 2015, and it took 5 years to determine nothing like it existed in marine records, officials said.

A team from NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research was working 24 miles off Puerto Rico when a remote control camera recorded the jelly’s pulsating light, the release said.

“It moved like a hot air balloon attached to the seafloor on two lines, maintaining a specific altitude above the seafloor,” NOAA Fisheries scientist Mike Ford said in the release.

“Whether it’s attached to the seabed, we’re not sure. We did not observe direct attachment during the dive, but it seems like the organism touches the seafloor.”

The creature was named Duobrachium sparksae, and it’s listed as “a new species of ctenophore, or comb jelly.” Lasers showed it to be roughly 2.3 inches tall, but with tentacles that extended more than a foot, NOAA said.

Comb jellies are “carnivores and many are highly efficient predators that eat small arthropods and many kinds of larvae,” NOAA Fisheries reports.

Like jellyfish, comb jellies “are gelatinous animals” that drift the oceans, but the two are not closely related, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Among the differences: comb jellies don’t sting, the museum reports.

“What I hope is that it will be discovered again and it will be sampled,” Collins says in the video. “It is possible that it could be years, decades maybe even a century before this species is encountered again.”