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Don’t adjust your screen and grab the soy sauce. What you see in front of you is a real, living, breathing sea animal currently on display in a Japanese aquarium – a creature that looks exactly like a piece of salmon sushi.
This sea creature snack is one of the most popular residents of Aquamarine Fukushima, a large aquarium on the east coast of Japan. In a Message on Twitter, aquarium staff identified the creature as an isopod – an order of long, flat, armored crustaceans that abound on land and in the sea. The nigiri-shaped superstar likely belongs to the genus Rocinela, which includes more than 40 species, aquarium keeper Mai Hibino said Vice.
While many isopods eat dead or decaying animals, Rocinela isopods tend to be parasites that carve comfortable homes on their backs or among the internal organs of other sea creatures. Most members of the genre appear dull and brown, but it’s possible that Fukushima’s famous sushi isopod had more than just a meal from one of its former hosts, Hibino said.
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“Because they are parasitic, we think that maybe the color of the fish he was feeding on transferred [to the isopod]”Hibino told Vice.
Fishermen caught the particular isopod in a net near the coastal town of Rausu in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. The creature was captured at a depth of 2,600 to 4,000 feet (800 to 1,200 meters) and appeared to have a full belly when discovered, Hibino said. Unfortunately, there is no way to know exactly what the isopod fed on to achieve its raw fishy complexion. Measuring just 1 inch (3 centimeters) in length, the isopod could easily have been stacked on top of any number of larger sea creatures, the aquarium said.
This strangeness is normal for isopods; more than 10,000 species have been described to date, with widely varying diets, habitats and sizes. For example, scientists writing in the journal ZooKeys in 2020 described the largest isopod ever detected: a puppy-sized chonker whose sinister bulging shell has earned him the nickname “Darth Vader of the Seas. “It’s a crustacean that we wouldn’t want to invite to dinner.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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