Amazing Purple Jelly Sighting in the Deep Sea

I live for moments like this. Things like this make the long nights editing grant proposals, the paper rejections, the failed experiments all worth it. To me, the best part of science is stuff like this: seeing something that completely takes my breath away. Even after studying animals like this for the last five years, this video has me in awe. The animal captured in this footage, simply put, is stunning:

This video was collected as part of the Nautilus Live expedition, a broadcast ocean exploration that anyone with internet access can be part of. The expedition is being headed by Dr. Robert Ballard, who famously discovered the wreck of the Titanic. But to me, the video above captures something much more rare and mysterious than any sunken ship.

This strange animal is a siphonophore, a relative of jellyfish. The most famous (infamous?) siphonophore is the portuguese man-of-war, but there are many species that live in the deep and are only seen on rare…