Little Red Boots

I bought myself the cutest red boots ever as a present for finishing my exams. I’ve been at the beach, and (more or less) wearing this outfit every day, occasionally swapping the shirt and skirt for denim shorts and a t-shirt. I am really enjoying pairing pops of red with light blue and white at the moment. wearing skirt - DIY tie - c/o Flapper Girl backpack - c/o Oasap blouse - vintage hat - c/o Wholesale boots - Ebay So when I was down at the beach the other day I became really fascinated with these little guys (there were hundreds washed up on the beach and they're pretty poisonous - not great for swimming). (image source) Also... "Mr." blue bottle is an entirely inaccurate term, as you are about to see.  They are known as "Blue Bottle Jellyfish" (aka "Portuguese Man O' War"), but as I found out, they aren't jellyfish at all - in fact they are actually "siphonophores", and they aren't even one animal, they're a colony of little animals called "zooids". Each zooid is it's own free-living solitary animal, but these asexual and specialised zooids remain attached to each other in a big colony - the blue bottle - for their entire lives. Some zooids perform the "eating" function for the blue bottle, some are the swimmers which propel the creature through the water, and some perform the function of the poisonous stinger, but they all work together in a colony to make up what appears as one creature! Here's a link to an awesome site about siphonophores, and I want to share an extract from it which I thought was really cool: "Siphonophores challenge us to think about what we mean when we call something an individual, a concept that we usually think of as being quite straightforward. Is a single zooid or an entire colony the siphonophore “individual”? ... Humans function as ecological, behavioral, and evolutionary individuals. But they are made up of many cells. So is the entire human an individual, or are each of the cells individuals?" Anyway, siphonophores are my new favourite creature.