– – They sound like the perfect subject for a Saturday night original movie on the Syfy Channel: The Vampire Squid from Hell (Vampyroteuthis infernalis). They rather look like a bad movie monster, too, having a type of cloak-like webbing, unusually large deep blue or red eyes, and light-producing organs covering its entire body which it can flash!
A kind of living fossil originally discovered in 1903, the vampire squid lives at a depth of about 3,000 feet and feeds on “marine snow,” a mixture of dead organic material and feces that floats down from above, often embedded in a mucus matrix, yum! The cephalopod grows to only about a foot long, and can survive in minimal oceanic oxygen zones, a fact which possibly enabled it to survive major extinction events in the evolutionary past. Feeding rather passively, the vampire squid is the only cephalopod in the world that’s not a predatory carnivore…
…and wouldn’t Vampire Squid from Hell be a great name for a metal band?!
FOXSYLVANIA 
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