< img src="https://savageventures.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/sea-squirt-with-a-panda-face.jpeg?w=1200"alt =" "> A sea squirt that lives off the coast of Japan and has an unique “panda face” is a new species to science. Oh, did we mention it has a skeleton-like body? You just can’t make this things up.
Divers have been taking photos of this strange colonial ascidian called gaikotsu-panda-hoyain Japanese and posting them online given that a minimum of 2018. When one Japanese scientist saw the photos, he set out to discover more about this special animal.
In a term paper, authors and scientists Naohiro Hasegawa and Hiroshi Kajihara say they took samples of the sea squirt with a panda face from a diving point off the coast of Kumejima Island.
“Our morphological assessment exposed that they represent a brand-new species, herein referred to as Clavelina ossipandaesp. nov., which can be identified from 44 congeners in the genus Clavelina,” the paper states.
The skeleton panda sea squirt (Clavelina ossipandae) lives in a nest with others of its kind. Each one has black markings, which look a lot like the black and white fur on a huge panda’s face. Also noteworthy is the skeletal look of the sea squirt’s tube-like body.
Sea squirts are marine animals that attach to the seafloor or some other kind of substrate. They are filter feeders, which means they filter nutrients from the water that passes through their bodies.
A sea squirt with a panda face lives off the coast of Japan, and scientists have discovered it’s a brand-new species.