OK, so let's talk about this flying seaweed. It's made of rangeomorph, so it's a colonial organism. Starts out looking like normal ol' seaweed with gas-filled floats, but the floats get bigger and bigger until it lifts out of the water.

There are at least two distinct organism types in every colony- a gas-float, filled with warm methane for lift, and a mouth attached to the bottom. Tentacles might be just part of the mouth, or they might be another set of individual organisms in the colony. In any case, the things that aren't gasbags will have to have multiple sub-types to account for tentacle specialization.

There will of course be many different species of this stuff, so we can account for lots of possible variations that people come up with, don't have to settle on one. What we discussed at the meeting today was a set up with sticky stinging tentacles hanging from a mouth attached to the bottom of each float. They would be prehensile at the ends, and when they brush up against something, they wrap around it and try to retract into the mouth; then, either the whole mouth closes, retracting all of its tentacles, and waits to digest whatever it is, or else each tentacle just dumps its stuff into a side-pocket for digestion.

Mewonders, should we give these things any sort of eyes? Perhaps just a spattering of photosensitive cells at the end of each tentacle, or some very basic pinhole eyes that respond to movement?

But if it's a colonial organism, how do the non-mouth cells get food and such? Additionally, there would have to be some sort of directing intelligence if the colony had specialized cells, which moves the whole thing closer to animal or plant status than colony.

1. this is called necroing, since you're bringing a dead thread back to 'life.' it is generally considered a Bad Thing™
2. logan (spacemonkey) might not mind it for this thread since no one's talked about the epimetheus project in ~forever and it's nice to see that people might be interested in it again
3. siphonophores have a very similar cell system (think portuguese man-o'-war), and they manage to get nutrient transport down just fine
4. intelligence isn't necessary; really it's just tissue separation and specialization taken a bit further. and one can certainly look at trees and say "yeah, xylem and phloem are good examples of tissue systems comprised of a single type of cell that solve the transport problem" and then continue on to see how much you can separate the tissues at either end of the transport system

Sorry about that-I didn't check the date on the post.