Pelagothuria is a genus of sea cucumber in the family Pelagothuriidae. It is monotypic, being represented by the single species Pelagothuria natatrix.
GENUS
via GBIF
Pelagothuria is a genus of sea cucumber in the family Pelagothuriidae. It is monotypic, being represented by the single species Pelagothuria natatrix.
== Characteristics == Pelagothuria is somewhat unusual in appearance in comparison with other sea cucumbers (and even within its family), as it looks more like a jellyfish with its large umbrella-like swimming structure supported by a ring of around 12 highly modified oral tentacles, its small tapered body and its swimming position with the mouth on top. The body is translucent with a pale purple pigmentation. The mouth is surrounded by around 15 short feeding tentacles like any sea cucumber, and the veil can be contracted like jellyfishes do (it is interrupted at the central ventral radius). The animal seems to reach around 16 cm in total diameter.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).