Bluebottles: the stinging siphonophore that can ruin a day at the beach

They’re the bane of summer days at the beach. But who knew bluebottles were so beautiful, and so interesting?

Wow: the split shot of a bluebottle. Picture: Matty Smith

They’re the bane of our summer days at the beach, inflicting painful stings on swimmers. But who knew bluebottles could look quite so ravishing? Photographer Matty Smith captured this ­marvellous split shot – a speciality of his – at sunrise in Shellharbour, south of Sydney. “I love their vibrant blue ­colour and all of the beautiful textures,” he says. “They really pop against a dark background.” (He’s talking to this magazine, btw, from the deck of a 60ft yacht in Antarctica. “I’ve got an iceberg on one side and thousand-metre mountains on the other.” This miracle of modern communication is thanks to the broadband internet provided by Starlink, the constellation of satellites put into space by Elon Musk. Three cheers for Musko, then! Anyone?)

The bluebottle, AKA the Pacific Man o’War, isn’t just a beautiful lifeform but a weird and fascinating one too. It’s misleading even to think of it as an individual: it’s a colony of four different types of organisms called “zooids”, each type dedicated to a certain task – flotation, stinging prey, digestion and reproduction. “The zooids act autonomously, but also in the service of the colony. They can’t ­survive on their own,” explains Dr Lisa-ann Gershwin, a marine scientist who specialises in all things blobbish. Bluebottles are a type of siphonophore, an order of weird marine organisms that all have this communal, pirate-party-ship vibe. It’s clear Gershwin has a soft spot for them. So is to ­correct to think of them as individuals, or as communities? “They’re both – they defy categorisation,” she says. “It’s something that has confounded scientists for 150 years.”

Bluebottles have long been a muse for Matty Smith; he’s accustomed to the stings. “When you’re up close in the water the tentacles tend to wash over you,” he says. The worst place he’s ever been stung is on the lips, he reckons, adding with a laugh: “Sometimes you have to suffer for your art.”