Sea salps, those gentle gelatinous barrel-shaped and penny-sized free-floating tunicates, have returned to our shores. Salps are completely harmless although honestly, they can be a bit annoying to swim through. A few always manage to get stuck in the bra area of my swimsuit, which is a little yucky, but nothing more than a nuisance.

Salp reproduction is fascinating, amazing actually. The salps that we saw at Good Harbor Beach this week were in the oozoid phase. They were singular individuals. The solitary salp reproduces asexually by producing a chain of up to hundreds in the aggregate, or blastozooid, stage. In this short film you can see both the oozoid and blastozooid phases.

Read more about salp life history on wiki here.

Read about how salps may be a weapon against global climate change in this NatGeo article here.