#4972 · 🪼 jellyfish, starfish, worms & co
Blue Button
Porpita porpita
🪼 Jellyfish, starfish, worms & co 📍 in Europe, not in NL
7 photos from iNaturalist (Creative Commons) · credits & licences
what is it?
Porpita porpita , or the blue button , is a marine organism consisting of a colony of hydroids found in the warmer, tropical and sub-tropical waters of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea and eastern Arabian Sea. It was first identified by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, under the basionym Medusa porpita .
base stats
Bars compare against all animals on log scales: up to 300,000 Dutch and 600,000 worldwide sightings (the most-seen species), 150 t (blue whale), 30 m and 400 years (Greenland shark).
fun facts
- No confirmed wild sightings in the Netherlands on iNaturalist: you'd have to travel for this one.
- 5,172 observations worldwide on iNaturalist.
- Scientifically named in 1758 (268 years ago).
fact sheet
- English
- Blue Button
- scientific name
- Porpita porpita
- class
- Hydrozoa
- order
- Anthoathecata
- family
- Porpitidae
- sightings in NL
- 0
- sightings in Europe
- 77
- sightings worldwide
- 5,172
- GBIF records in NL
- 0
- weight
- —
- length
- —
- lifespan
- —
- named
- 1758
relatives· Porpitidae
Sources: iNaturalist taxon 59683, Wikidata Q2535508, GBIF 5185632, Wikipedia (EN), Wikipedia (NL). Intro text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).Updated 2026-10-24.