Researchers spot bizarre ‘googly-eyed’ stubby squid 900 feet down on the sea floor off California
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It looks uncannily like something you’d expect to see on Sesame Street – and not on the seabed 900 metres down, the Daily Mail reported.
The amazing video of the googly-eyed squid has gone viral after it was spotted off the coast of California by a research vessel.
The stubby squid was spotted by the the E/V Nautilus, which uses a remotely operated underwater vehicle to explore the ocean floor, the Daily Mail reported.
As the drone sub approaches the cephalopod, the team can be heard trying to determine at first whether it is an octopus or cuttlefish.
As the see it, even the scientists are amazed.
‘They look like googly eyes … It looks so fake!’ one woman exclaims in the video.
‘It’s like some little kid dropped their toy.’
Two others in the video comment that the eyes look as though they were painted on.
The team then dissolves into laughter while watching the animal, while one admits ‘it’s freaking me out!’ and the other says ‘maybe its a cuddlefish!’
The team later determined the cephalopod was a Stubby squid — also known as Rossia pacifica — which is closely related to cuttlefish, according to a description of the video posted by the team that captured the footage. This species spends life on the seafloor, activating a sticky mucus jacket and burrowing into the sediment to camouflage, leaving their eyes poking out to spot prey like shrimp and small fish,’ the description on the E/V Nautilus YouTube page read. It was spotted in Trask Knoll, a NW-SE elongated hill located south of Santa Rosa island, in the outer California borderland. It is about 20 km-long and ~400 m-high. Little is known about this feature, except that it appears to be bounded to the west by a fault, the Trask Knoll fault.
Earlier studies indicate that Miocene sedimentary rocks cover most of Trask Knoll, but at the center is a metamorphic rock of unknown age.
It is not the first strange creature spotted by the sub.
Last months a mysterious purple orb sucked off the sea bed during a live-streamed Nautilus exploration has stumped scientists, and naturally the internet too. Inquisitive viewers of the YouTube video have made multiple guesses as to its origins, ranging from an ‘alien egg’ to a brand new species of Pokemon.
In fact it is more likely the bright orb, found by the Channel Islands of California, is a type of marine mollusc.