Vampire Squid

• GeneralIt does not hunt: it feeds on marine snow, the debris that drifts down from the surface.
• fisiologíaFor all its name it is no active predator: it gathers organic particles with retractable filaments in deep water with very little oxygen.
• fisiologíaIt can live in stretches of ocean where oxygen runs extremely low, and where most predators cannot compete with it for the same food.
• Instead of ink it expels a cloud of mucus carrying thousands of luminous particles to bewilder predators.
• Unlike almost all cephalopods, it does not die after a single spawning: the female lays in several batches over the course of her life.
• It is neither a squid nor an octopus: it is the sole survivor of a lineage that split from both some 165 million years ago.
• It is the only cephalopod that does not eat living prey. It feeds on marine snow, the constant rain of organic debris falling from the surface, gathering it by extending two sticky filaments up to eight times its body length, like a fishing rod.
• It then draws the filament between its arms: the suckers secrete mucus that binds the particles into a ball, and finger-like cirri carry it to the mouth.
• It lives where almost nothing can: it has the lowest mass-specific metabolism of any cephalopod and the highest-affinity oxygen-binding haemocyanin known in the group.
• It breaks another cephalopod rule: instead of breeding once and dying, it breeds repeatedly over a life of some eight years.
• Its defence is not ink but light: it releases a cloud of sticky bioluminescent mucus and wraps itself in its own membranous cloak.
• Carl Chun named it in 1903 for its dark red colour, its red eyes and the cloak-like web between its arms.

Habitat & environment

The oxygen minimum zone (600-1,200 m)

Sources consulted: Chun (1903); Hoving y Robison (2012), Proceedings of the Royal Society B; MBARI; Golikov et al. (2019), Scientific Reports