[albertcardona]

A popular Soviet SF writer Sever Gansovsky in his short story "The Host of Bay" (1962) described a sea monster consisting of microscopical particles which can self-organize themselves into a unity for hunt.

There's a sea colony animal--siphonophore--that can change shape from a broad, amorphous colony mass into a streamlined compact cylinder, for swimming. The colony members are not free-living; the colony develops by budding. If the members were separate and assembled later on, science fiction would have been beaten again by a living organism. Does anyone know of an example of a species in which separated individuals assemble into a colony? There are descriptions of sponges, where dissociating the sponge cells, passing them through a sieve, and then letting it sit for a bit results in the cells reassembling. But the sponge doesn't look menacing neither predates.