I made the terrible mistake of dimly remembering that the Portuguese man-o-war is not a jellyfish so trying to find out what they actually are
Anyway turns out they are floating colonies of at least 4 specialised organisms and science doesn't actually know anything about the early stages of their development, and there's at least one bit on the sex module (which they have, and it fucking swims off) that science no idea what it does.
From my understanding of what I have read, while the Portuguese man-o-war itself cannot swim, only float where the tides and winds take it, the detachable sex module can and does.
ok ok we're all having banter about detachable penises and floating dongs but I feel obliged to say in fact man-o-wars have a sex binary and therefore every goddamn weird module in one colony is either male, or female, and therefore some of them are in fact detachable she/they pussies.
So from my understanding of the Portuguese man-o-war life cycle, science knows that the sex module swims off. Then they don't know where it goes, how it fertilises, or what happens once it's fertilised, and basically the next thing they know happens is the sail (which is an individual separate organism in the colony) to develop so the fucker floats up.
@stavvers And then there's the Irukandji family of box jellyfish, which are absolutely tiny (their bell is about 5mm in diameter, but their tentacles are over a metre long) and will totally murder you, and you will die screaming in agony:
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