What's actually going on with this animal's anatomy is so wacky I don't have time to explain it right now but I'm reblogging it to do it later suffice to say there are hundreds of sea squirts in this sea squirt and their arrangement is very silly
Okay let me try to explain this, a single sea squirt is usually a bag that filters feeds as it draws water into one hole and expels it out the other, so just a bag with a mouth pipe and a butt pipe. It's also important to understand that these are chordates, like us vertebrates, with a similar body structure in their early embryonic stages. The notochord just doesn't develop into a proper spine, and the species with these bag-like adult stages absorb it completely:
So, now look at the blobby mass in the OP, and you'll see a bunch of large holes surrounded by rings of smaller holes:
every small hole is the intake of a colony member. Every large hole is one big exhaust port they all share, so this is how the colonial sea squirts are put together:
