January 23, 2025
2 pain read
“Mysterious mollusk” brightly identified
This strange sea creature surprised scientists for 20 years. Here’s what really is.
A mysterious mollusk of Mbari Tiburon remote vehicles observed the outside of the Monterey gorge, approximately 1,900 meters deep.
Total darkness. Crushing pressure. Frozen cold. Midnight Pacific Ocean -3.300 and 13,100 feet deepNot a pleasant place. But that does not prevent a delicate and disgusting “mysterious mollusk” to establish the store in this welcoming water column.
For more than 20 years California Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) Scientists have occasionally encountered five-inch translucent creatures with a strange mix of features. His face is surrounded by large hood, which uses prey and used to reach aircraft like jellyfish. The tail is equipped, and provoked, can release one. When touching, his cap and tail shines with a constellation of blue-green dots like a planetary underwater.
Now scientists have determined this deep sea riddle is a nudibranchio, or Seafood-But so strange, it’s worth it Creating a completely new family of nudibranchiveResearchers in the report Deep Sea Research I: Work of oceanographic research. Duplicate Bathydevius Caudactylus, It is the first nudibranch in the deep sea ur column, which is floating in the bottom, or floating near the surface, for example.
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Mysterious mollusk Bathydevius caudactylus It has been observed at a depth of approximately 1,550 meters. It has a wide tail and rowing, with various finger-shaped outfits called Dactilo called Defense.
Steven Haddock has a unique bag for catching the characteristics of other nudibranches. Haddock was when scientists saw the mollusk for the first time, 2000. Using a distant vehicle during exploration. “We were all thinking about what we thought,” he remembers.
Since then, in the course of the two decades, researchers observe more than 100 B. Caudactylus and some studied in their labs. The creature revealed that the genetic study revealed that he probably separated from other nudibranches; So even if it shares some features with other species, he developed an eclectic range of its characteristics independently. “Similar features can evolve multiple times, but it is quite nice to see in a kind of organism in different situations than we see in other nudibranches,” says Jessica Goodheart, American mollusk researchers in the Museum of Natural History. In New York City. “Maybe (such characteristics) can become much easier than we expected.”
