I sadly am having trouble finding the exact species but they were a type of amphipods (a diverse group of crustaceans)
I actually got to see some today at a beach in the form of sandhoppers, which are the little shrimps guys you will sometimes find in the sand that tend to hop (as the name implies)
Hagfish are widely considered the most disgusting animals in the ocean, if not on earth (not by me motherfuckers). The eel-shaped creatures use four pairs of thin sensory tentacles
surrounding their mouths to find food—including carcasses of much larger
animals. Once they find their meal, they bury into it face-first to
bore a tunnel deep into its flesh.
Despite the fact that they seem repulsive, they are undoubtedly
unique—and just because animals are disgusting to human sensibilities
doesn’t mean they don’t deserve our attention and protection. That is
the message behind Hagfish Day,
which occurs every year on the third Wednesday of October: that we can
find beauty in the ugly and protect all ocean animals. Here are 14 fun
facts about the unusual group of animals…
this cuttlefish was NOT happy about this starfish trying to touch him
they shouldn’t be! Most starfish are predators and it would’ve eaten them if they were sick, injured or trapped!
It’s 1am and I’m finding out that starfish are predators.
here are some more things about that:
They don’t have teeth or jaws *in their mouths*, so the most common starfish feeding method is to simply cover their prey, usually a clam or a snail or something else very slow, and flip their own stomach inside-out to smother and digest the prey externally.
I specify “in their mouths” because in some starfish the entire body surface is blanketed in extremely tiny jaw-like structures, sometimes thousands of them. These can be purely defensive or they can be a means of making the starfish “sticky” to small prey such as shrimp.
While most sea stars simply rely on eating things slower than themselves – sometimes including healthy, but sleeping fish – there are also stars who form an ambush trap ike this. Small animals try to hide under this nice cave and then the starfish clamps down on them to do the stomach trick.
Also this isn’t related to them killing things but most sea stars have fully functioning eyes, almost invisibly tiny, at the end of each arm.
this was educational but also gave me slow-motion anxiety for that little cuttlefish
Don’t worry, cuttlefish are fast and intelligent. Certainly more intelligent than something with no brain. Plus, that looks like one of the scavenging species of starfish. It was probably just going in that general direction rather than trying to eat the cuttlefish.
Even knowing they don’t want to eat people and that they’re asleep, because this is how they sleep, the idea of floating in an empty blue void with a bunch of a giant grey slab creatures just hovering around doing nothing is pleasingly frightening on a sort of primal existential level
“Pyrosomes, genus Pyrosoma, are free-floating colonial tunicates that live usually in the upper layers of the open ocean in warm seas, although some may be found at greater depths. Pyrosomes are cylindrical- or conical-shaped colonies made up of hundreds to thousands of individuals, known as zooids. Colonies range in size from less than one centimeter to several metres in length.
Each zooid is only a few millimetres in size, but is embedded in a common gelatinous tunic that joins all of the individuals. Each zooid opens both to the inside and outside of the “tube”, drawing in ocean water from the outside to its internal filtering mesh called the branchial basket, extracting the microscopic plant cells on which it feeds, and then expelling the filtered water to the inside of the cylinder of the colony. The colony is bumpy on the outside, each bump representing a single zooid, but nearly smooth, though perforated with holes for each zooid, on the inside.
Pyrosomes are planktonic, which means their movements are largely controlled by currents, tides, and waves in the oceans. On a smaller scale, however, each colony can move itself slowly by the process of jet propulsion, created by the coordinated beating of cilia in the branchial baskets of all the zooids, which also create feeding currents.
Pyrosomes are brightly bioluminescent, flashing a pale blue-green light that can be seen for many tens of metres. The name Pyrosoma comes from the Greek (pyro = “fire”, soma = “body”). Pyrosomes are closely related to salps, and are sometimes called “fire salps”.
Sailors on the ocean are occasionally treated to calm seas containing many pyrosomes, all luminescing on a dark night.” (x)
Can we talk about how that scuba diver saw this massive colonial tunicate tube and was like I GOTTA RIDE THAT
…a strikingly marked blue and yellow species of Gammarid amphipod that is known to occur along the coast of South Africa, ranging from the Cape Peninsula to Port Elizabeth. Hunchback amphipods are often encountered from the subtidal zone down to at least 25 meters (82 feet), where it often seen near sessile invertebrates like sponges or corals.
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