Recently, scientists off the coast of Greece found underwater pools of opal and carbon dioxide, but a different underwater mass found near Turkey has a different group of divers utterly flummoxed.
As seen in the video, this translucent dotted blob is enormous, measuring about 13 feet around. Diver Lutfu Tanriover told Deep Sea News they felt a mixture of “both excitement and fear” as they approached the mass. When touched, it felt “very soft,” and it looked gelatinous.
The puzzled divers swam around it for some time, examining it closely with flashlights, but could not identify what the sphere was. Thus, they uploaded it online in hopes someone else could, appropriately titling the video “the thing”.
A mystery solved?
One expert thinks he might have the answer—Michael Vecchione, director of the NOAA National Systematics Laboratory at the Smithsonian and a curator of cephalopods at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. According to him, the sparkling dots are squid eggs, each around 0.07 inches long, embedded in a gelatinous nest.
“We don’t know exactly how many eggs are in there,” but it’s likely on the order of thousands to tens of thousands Vecchione told Live Science.
The species is thought to be Ommastrephes bartramii, or the neon flying squid—voracious predators that can reach nearly five feet in length. They are typically found in subtropical and temperate waters—which they often shoot out of like flying fish, occasionally landing on the decks of ships by accident.This unusual behavior is thought to be a predator-avoidance technique.
Despite this advanced escape method, O. bartramii is a major target for predators, which is probably why they lay so many eggs in a single nest.
“If you have an animal that makes a million babies for the population to remain stable, only two of them [need to] survive,” Vecchione said. “Lots of things like to eat them, including people.”
If they can avoid the myriad of predators trying to eat them, the full lifespan of the neon flying squid is only one or two years—but they make that time count.
“They are very important in the food web,” Vecchione said. “They live fast and die young.”
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Image credit: Luftu Tanriover/Vimeo
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