Strange things dwell out in the open ocean.

Bobbing atop the waves, Becky Ripley and Emily Knight meet one such creature, the Portuguese Man O’War.

With its bulbous air-sacs and trailing tentacles you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a jellyfish, but you’d be wrong. It’s a colony, a society of tiny individual animals, who work together to eat, hunt and reproduce as one.

In the Age of the Individual, we humans like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient little nodes who don’t need nobody. But that perspective gets called into question when you consider where we live.

Thanks to some complex maths and some incredible data-crunching, we’re beginning to see the cities we inhabit in a different light. They grow, move, breathe, and die, just like a living organism, according to strict mathematical principles.

Just like polyps in a Man O’ War, are we really any more than cogs in a machine?

Featuring:

* Marine Biologist, Dr John Copley from the University of Southampton

Produced and presented by Becky Ripley and Emily Knight.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 2019.