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A sea cucumber that looks like a headless chicken was captured on video in deep seas near East Antarctica, thousands of miles from where one of these species had been seen.
NOAA
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A sea cucumber that looks like a headless chicken was captured on video in deep seas near East Antarctica, thousands of miles from where one of these species had been seen.
NOAA
Hold on to your hats: a sea cucumber that looks like a headless chicken has been captured in video in deep waters near eastern Antarctica.
It's a surprising place for the speciesEnypniastes eximia, to present oneself. The last filmed location was thousands of kilometers away in the Gulf of Mexico last year.
Researchers from Australia's Ministry of Environment and Energy have noticed the animal using the new offshore camera technology that would have been developed with the commercial fishing sector at longline to facilitate management of the fishery. The idea is to find vulnerable ecosystems to prevent the fishing industry from causing damage.
"We needed something that could be projected on the side of a boat and would continue to run reliably under extreme pressure in complete darkness for long periods of time," said Dirk Welsford, program manager for the Australian Antarctic Division, in a statement. "Some of the images we receive from cameras are breathtaking, including species that we have never seen in this part of the world."
It describes the moment when the sea creature resembling a bird has entered their field of vision. "We have hours and hours of footage not really, then one of our technicians was sitting, he was watching these footage and the chicken monster was floating beyond," Welsford says ABC of Australia.
Viewing:
"They do not do much, they lie there and they suck the bottom of the sea to try to extract food," Welsford said.
This delicate feeding pattern was visible in a film shot last year in the Gulf of Mexico while traveling from the Okeanos Explorer ship of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The animal "spends most of its time on the seabed, feeding on surface sediments, but it can swim if it wants to get there faster or avoid a predator," according to NOAA.
As the New York Times noted, it is unusual for a sea cucumber to swim, which is possible for this animal because of its fins. The newspaper adds that it was first sighted in the 1880s in Peruvian waters.
It is sometimes called the Spanish dancer, probably because of these graceful movements of the fins. The fact that it appeared in the Southern Ocean only underscores how much we need to learn about the depths.
"There are still many, many mysteries in the deep ocean that we are just beginning to scratch the surface," Welsford told ABC.
The Australian Antarctic Division announced that the International Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora, responsible for the management of the Southern Ocean, has opened an annual meeting on Monday to discuss the protection of the region and the fight against the effects of climate change.
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