it’s time to talk about weird animals again here at bunjywunjy.tumblr.com, and today our topic is Predatory Tunicates, which are a species of evil sock puppet that lives on the sides of deep sea canyons.
wokka wokka wokka!
they function pretty much exactly like you’d think they would, behaving much like a venus flytrap.
fish goes in, fish DOES NOT COME OUT
the Predatory Tunicate is also the only tunicate known to be carnivorous. other tunicates are content to drift in the currents like lonely plastic bags, lacking the drive and ambition of the Predatory Tunicate.
role model!
also, like most deep sea creatures, Predatory Tunicates are massively improved by the addition of googly eyes.
I’ve reblogged these so many times but I forget if anyone ever added the OTHER varieties of carnivorous deep-sea squirt?
First, this one was observed in 2009 off the coast of Tasmania and I can’t find if it even has a name yet, but the mouth opens a completely different, less hilarious way.
Then there’s the kind of unsettling CULEOLUS which floats like a kite on the end of a loooong thin stalk.
This is a fucking head on a string. With a giant chin.
Finally there’s DICOPIA ANTIRRHINUM which is just like the OP “sock puppet” variety, but with a slightly different strategy! As you can see it has a camouflaged surface, flattened shaped and a shorter “stalk” it keeps mostly buried, so it can pretend to be nothing but a little mound of dirt when it wants to.
I just can’t get enough of how related animals vary in their tricks and gimmicks.
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