FOXSYLVANIA

– – 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?!

This entry was posted on September 27, 2012 at 2:00 am and is filed under animal oddities, animals, aquatic, science, strange. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.