Vampire Squid from Hell!

Get a load of this sucker. Click the image to see a larger version.

Vampy here (Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which means “Vampire squid from Hell” in Latin) is a relict, the last surviving member of the order Vampyroteuthis. It lives in the deep ocean, and, like many deep sea species, is ugly enough to scare the stupid out of you. Also like many deep-sea predators, it has light-producing cells it can use to stun and confuse prey. This is what that kind of sparkling looks like.

It was originally thought to be an octopus. It was always thought to be creepy:

Like all good vampires, it’s a blue-blood: It uses hemocyanin instead of the hemoglobin we use, making its blood more efficient at binding oxygen. This allows it to survive low oxygen conditions that would kill most cephalopods.

It also has a heck of an evasion strategy:

My god, it vomits stars! I’d love to see anyone from Twilight do that.

This page goes into a lot more detail about its evolutionary history, emphasizing the fact it’s just plain freaky:

This is in an animal that’s a foot long, maximum, counting the arms, emphasizing the fact it lives in the dark places in our world we’re just barely able to explore, and we know practically nothing about. For all we know, there could be other kinds of vampire squids out there, just waiting for us to go deep enough long enough to find them.

Holy shit, that is one scary cthulan critter :eek:

It’s probably just my twisted mind, but doesn’t it have the kind of mouth you’d expect to find on a plastic blow-up doll?

“Hey there Mr. Marine Biologist. Lookin’ for a date?”

It does, which makes that one of the wrongest things I’ve ever read on this message board. You’re precisely the kind of deranged pervert I look for in a community.

[quote=“Derleth, post:4, topic:554981”]

One of us!
One of us!
Gooba gobba one of us!