It’s a weird reproductive strategy, but apparently it works scientists know of at least 30 distinct species of anglerfish. Only female anglerfish hunt their prey this way the much smaller males latch onto the females and live as parasites, without internal organs or even eyes.
If you get close enough to the light, the last thing you see might be a gaping mouth full of very pointy teeth. Like a kid holding a flashlight up to his face to tell a scary story at a sleepover, the anglerfish dangles a bioluminescent lantern, mounted on a piece of dorsal spine, in front of its head to lure potential prey. Most of the ocean’s volume lies in this endless darkness, broken only by eerie flashes of light from the strange, glowing creatures who lurk in these depths.Īnd the final level of the Google Doodle game will bring you face to extremely toothy face with one of the most iconic of the abyssal denizens: the anglerfish. If you choose to flee the vampire squid by swimming even deeper into the black water, you’ll find yourself 2,000 meters (6,500 feet, more than a mile) beneath the sunlit surface. It does have a proper movie vampire’s flair for the dramatic, however when frightened, the squid pulls its cape over its head, squirts a cloud of bioluminescent mucus, and frantically flashes more bioluminescence at its attacker. That’s right the vampire squid is a scavenger. The vampire squid just drifts along in the darkness, letting the ocean currents carry it where they will, until it bumps into the remains of plankton or small marine animals falling slowly downward through the water column. There’s definitely something a little suspicious about that. Well, there’s also its incredibly slow metabolism, which allows it to live in waters with too little oxygen for most creatures. It’s just 30 centimeters (1 foot) long, and the only thing vampiric about it is its cape – a membrane between its arms.
Zoologists gave the vampire squid the formal name Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which means "vampire squid from Hell," but the little squid doesn’t live up to its monstrous name. One of them, for instance, became the world’s laziest vampire.
There’s also very little oxygen at these depths, so the creatures who live down here have evolved unique ways of surviving. If you escape the dreaded Boops boops, you’ll swim down past 1,000 meters and into the midnight zone, where no light reaches.
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