The Portuguese man o’ war (Physalia) is an oceanic animal found in waters across the entire world. Well, it isn’t an animal. That’s the first problem. It looks like an animal, certainly. It’s easily mistaken for a jellyfish, which is an animal. The article is the problem here. The man o’ war isn’t an animal. They're animals. They’re a Siphonorophore: a whole made up of multiple tiny individual organisms all working together.

Those of us who live in Australia, at least on the coast, are probably familiar with the Portuguese man o’ war by its colloquial name, the bluebottle. I have rare vivid memories from my childhood on Bribie Island, watching my uncle burst the gelatinous sail with the heel of his thong. They aren’t exclusive to Australia. Coasts all around the world observe the things washing up, still posing danger hours after they’ve died.

Truthfully, I struggle a little to get my head around how man o’ wars actually work. They’re colonial organisms, which means that they consist of a number of tiny species that all come together to form one creature. Its individual parts are called zooids. It’s a lot like Voltron, which I’ve never seen; or Captain Planet, which I’ve also never seen.

Part of the problem of explaining the man o’ war is that even man o’ war experts don’t really know how it goes together. It’s an animal that defies our idea of an animal. An animal generally breathes, moves, eats and reproduces. The man o’ war technically does all of these things, but they’re compartmentalised. There’s one guy for breathing. There’s one for moving. Another guy eats. I must make clear how many guys are involved here: each part of the system is made up of innumerable zooids all clustered together. It’s more city than animal. They all reproduce together, in a single egg that releases hundreds of polyps. Polyp? More like polycule! Please kill me, urgently.

The man o’ war is an ocean surface-dweller. Most of the time I’m focused on the deep ocean, but there’s an entire universe at the very top. The man o’ war isn’t the only organism that sails with the wind. Some sea slugs, like the blue sea dragon, skate on the surface tension. The violet sea-snail uses a raft of bubbles to stay afloat. This is to say nothing of the seabirds that accompany and prey upon them. The man o’ war is a system within a system. None of the individual organisms could possibly survive alone. There’s often another, non-colonial member here: the man o’ war fish (Nomeus gronovii). The man o’ war fish has evolved to live within the tentacles of the organism, having developed some immunity to the venom. It eats many of the smaller tentacles, though it avoids the larger ones - total immunity is hard to come by. In return, the man o’ war fish attracts larger predatory fish without any immunity, which the man o’ war stings and eats. It’s not a flawless system, but it’s a good one.

I don’t know how the individual parts of the man o’ war know to work together. I don’t know if they think of themselves as a single animal, or as part of a collective, or as a collective within a bigger collective. Realistically, as hydrozoans, they probably don’t think a great deal at all. All the zooids within a type within an instance of the man o’ war are genetically identical. You live in a collective with hundreds (thousands?) of identical twins, all working to do a single job for the sake of everyone. 

I could make this into an analogy for community and cooperation. It’s right there if you really want it. It would feel dishonest to write about that, though, at least at this moment in my life. More than ever, I have doubts about my place. I'm not sure which part of the man o’ war I’m capable of being. Instead, it brings to mind fragmentation. A person is also an exercise in cooperation. There’s a part of me that breathes, and a part that eats, and part that moves. There’s a part of me that stings, but I try not to let that one out too often. The bit that fails is a part of me, too. I rarely feel that all of those parts are working together. I often make more sense as a colony: a collective of traits and impulses that may or may not be attached to one another. Is that damage, or is that just what it’s like to be alive? That one’s not rhetorical–please tell me if you know.

Recovery means different things to different people. Is it enough to form a whole? Is it enough to find the ways your fragments work in synergy, and then work with that? “Fake it til you make it” is a common phrase in recovery, for good reason, but it critically does not tell you how to tell when you’ve made it. What happens when meeting your goals doesn’t help? How long do you give it between making it and feeling that you’ve made it? I don’t have a benchmark for what’s supposed to feel normal for a human. I’m not sure what feels normal for a Siphonophore, either, though at a guess I feel closer to that than the human version.

The man o’ war would not necessarily be a better animal, or animals, if it were a whole. It would, certainly, be different. It would be a jellyfish, more coherent but less distinct. I also don’t know if I’d be a better animal if I was all together, just that I’d be a different one. I don’t think anything that makes up the man o’ war looks at their fellow surface-dwellers and wishes they were like them. As far as we know, there’s no zooid responsible for envy. Even if the man o’ war wanted to be something other than a man o’ war, it can’t do anything about it. All it can do is float and eat and reproduce and then do it all over again, all compartmentalised. The animals involved are only concerned with their job. The human animal is traditionally concerned with much, much more.

There is no need for re-integration for the man o’ war. It functions exactly as it should: in pieces. For humans, fragmentation is not so simple. It takes years to become whole again. In some cases, entire lifetimes. There’s a few key differences here. For instance, humans are cursed with brains and nervous systems. We also lack a fish that’s adapted to feed on our tentacles, which I personally take as a huge win for Homo sapiens. We’ve gotta get them where we can. I don’t live on the surface of the ocean, and I don’t have a memory of washing up on a beach in Queensland and being punctured by a rubber shoe. There’s a lot of things I don’t remember. Maybe I will one day, and maybe I won’t. What I take from the man o’ war, and other Siphonophores, is that fragmentation doesn’t necessitate. Sometimes it’s enough to float on the surface, allowing my parts to work independently together. It can’t go on like this forever. The man o’ war dies eventually. But it’s enough for now. Anyway, there’s no other choice.