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monopoliessucktoday at 6:49 AM3 repliesview on HN

I added Jellyfish and then Portuguese Man-o-war.

It took the man o war, but crossed out Jellyfish and said "added a vaguer term", but a jellyfish and a man-o-war are discrete animals.

The man-o-war is a colonial siphonophore composed of zooids, while a jellyfish is a singular marine organism.

They're both in the phylum Cnidaria, and that would have been a more vague term had I entered it.


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cainxinthtoday at 11:29 AM

It raises the question: can a colony of individual animals (zooids in this case) that work cooperatively be called a singular animal itself? I think biologists say yes, but it’s an interesting taxonomic boundary.

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NooneAtAll3today at 12:07 PM

that's like saying tomato is a fruit

in biological journal, sure - for practical purposes straight up no

if it looks like a jellyfish, stings like a jellyfish and behaves like a jellyfish - then it doesn't matter what it looks like under a microscope, it is jellyfish

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4gotunameagaintoday at 7:40 AM

yeah there are lots of inaccuracies.

I added bobcat, then lynx, and it would not accept lynx because bobcat was there.

Oh, and, 77, just woke up. No coffee.

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