strobilate

English

Etymology

By surface analysis, strobil(e) +‎ -ate, or strobil(us) +‎ -ate.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈstɹəʊbɪleɪt/
  • Audio (Southern England):(file)

Verb

strobilate (third-person singular simple present strobilates, present participle strobilating, simple past and past participle strobilated)

  2. (intransitive, biology) To produce a strobile, a cone-shaped life form that is a stage of asexual reproduction that some invertebrates pass through.
    • 2007 September 16, Saki Knafo, quoting Neil Allicock, “My Family Has High Hopes for Me Because They Know I’m Going to Do Great Things”, in The New York Times‎[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 4 May 2023:
      "Strobilation is like: All right, the male jellyfish releases his sperm into the water and the female jellyfish, her eggs catch them, right? So, when they fuse, it turns into a little polyp. The polyp hooks on to a rock, and the temperature and different types of food make the polyp grow faster. So that’s what we try to do, make them strobilate faster."
    • 2014, Theo Tait, “Water-Borne Zombies”, in London Review of Books, volume 36, number 5:
      These, in turn, reproduce by cloning; when conditions are right, they ‘strobilate’, elongating and splitting into a stack of discs which develop into larvae, and break away to become medusae.

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