Strange things happen at the bottom of the ocean. Cryptic tubeworms feast on sunken whale bones, furry crabs crawl around seeping geothermal vents, and the bug-eyed, polka-dotted glass squid has the audacity to exist.
Now, researchers have discovered that even in the ocean’s dead zones, where oxygen levels are too low to sustain much life, swimming scavengers will risk suffocation to go after a particularly juicy snack. In this case it’s a pig carcass dropped there by forensic scientists, but never fear — they’d eat you too.
I can’t get the infernal embed code to work, but you can watch National Geographic’s video report here. (Warning: Might make you hungry. Or never hungry again, depending on your constitution.)
The amazing part, as a commenter at Deep Sea News notes, is that the water’s so oxygen-poor that the pig sat untouched for two whole months. Anywhere else and it’d have been lunch much sooner.
o_O
That one creature looks like someone stuck googly eyes on a ghost squid and trapped it inside a polka-dot beach ball