The first time I saw these glitzy glamour bubbles I had no idea what I was looking at, so I took a photo and went home to do some digging. A little research uncovered a really cool organism. Commonly known as a dead sailor’s eyeballs, or bubble algae, they shine like small mirrors, catching the light.

Bubble algae are found across the globe in the shallow seas of tropical and subtropical oceans, where they tend to be more prevalent in the warmer months.

But the BEST bit about these bubbles is that they are one of the largest single-celled organisms in the world – with multiple nuclei! They can reach the size of golf balls (which is how big a couple are in the image, above).

(To put this into perspective, you have one billion – that’s 1,000,000,000 – cells for every gram of your body.)

The algae’s scientific name is Valonia ventricosa. These squishy balls reproduce through an asexual process, so if you accidentally pop one and you’ll end up with a whole load of ‘daughters’. Which means they can be invasive.

According to New Heaven Reef Conservation these eye-catching algae have been studied extensively – for more than 100 years, with more than 2000 scientific papers as a result – yet we still don’t know how they reproduce sexually, nor do we know what, if anything, likes to eat them.

But nevertheless, they ARE cool! And unique.