You don’t get much weirder looking than the sea pig, a genus of sea cucumbers that look straight out of Doctor Who.
Named for their plump, pink, and rounded bodies, sea pigs are very abundant, but you are unlikely to ever see one, living as they do at depths of over 1,200 to 5,000 metres (that’s over three miles!).
- It chewed off its entire body, from the neck down... You might think fully-functioning, disembodied heads are the stuff of nightmares – but think again...
- Why don’t deep-sea animals implode? Here's how they survive extreme pressures at the bottom of the ocean
Their mode of locomotion is one of their many bizarre characteristics. They crawl across the deep-sea floor using specialised tubular “legs” that can be inflated and deflated with water, moving with hydraulics.
This also allows them to churn up the soft mud under their “feet” as they move, freeing bits of decaying plant and animal material to snack on.
We named it one of the world's weirdest sea creatures
- Squirting cucumbers terrified the Romans – and this new high-speed video reveals exactly why
- This weird sea cucumber fires poisonous intestines from its butt to deter predators. Don't worry, they grow back...
- It looks like a pineapple crossed with a giant sausage – colossal ocean creature filmed crawling along seafloor
Main image: A living Scotoplanes from Monterey Bay with a juvenile Neolithodes diomedae king crab sheltering beneath it at a depth of approx. 1260 metres. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, 2016.
