The Vampire Squid Eats Falling Garbage, Not Blood
It is the size of a football, lives where almost nothing else can breathe, and feeds itself by dangling a sticky string and waiting.
Vampyroteuthis infernalis — "vampire squid from hell" — is the size and shape of a dark red football, with eyes the color of a blue traffic light. It lives between roughly 600 and 900 meters down, in the oxygen minimum zone, where the water holds so little oxygen that almost nothing else can hunt there. For nearly a century after the species was named in 1903, no one knew what it ate.
In 2012 Henk-Jan Hoving and Bruce Robison at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute published the answer in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. They had spent years pulling apart preserved stomach contents and watching live animals from MBARI's remotely operated submersibles. The vampire squid is not a hunter. It is a detritivore — a garbage eater. Its food is marine snow: the steady downward drift of dead microorganisms, copepod feces, and the discarded mucous houses of larvaceans, sifting through the deep ocean like dirty snowfall.
The collection method is improvised tackle. Two of its eight arms are modified into thin filaments that can extend up to eight times the squid's body length. The squid hangs in the water column, motionless to save oxygen, and lets one filament out into the dark. Stiff hairs along the filament catch passing debris. When enough has accumulated, the squid retracts the line, scrapes the catch off with its arms, wraps it in mucus secreted from the suckers, and swallows the parcel whole.
The cousins of Vampyroteuthis — true squids and true octopuses — chase prey and burn oxygen doing it. The vampire squid skipped that arms race entirely and made a living off what the rest of the ocean wastes.
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