‘HEADLESS CHICKEN MONSTER’ SPOTTED IN THE DEEP SEA
What lives a mile under the sea, has tentacles and fins and looks like a decapitated chicken ready for roasting?
The headless chicken monster, of course.
Yes, that is actually the name of a rare creature caught on film recently by researchers working in the Antarctic Ocean, about 2,500 miles off the southwest corner of Australia.
The “monster” — actually a sea cucumber that helps to filter organic matter on the ocean floor — has been caught on film only once before, last year in the Gulf of Mexico.
Floored by its unusual physique, scientists call it the headless chicken monster. (It is also known as the swimming sea cucumber, the Spanish dancer and by its scientific name — Enypniastes eximia.)
“It looks a bit like a chicken just before you put it in oven,” said Dirk Welsford, the program leader for the Australian Antarctic Division, who was among the researchers to spot the animal off the coast of Antarctica.
As part of a project to explore the effect of fishing on sensitive marine ecosystems, Welsford and his team attached specially designed cameras to fishing lines dropped to depths of 3 kilometers.
This particular project, Welsford said, was designed to explore the effects of commercial fishing on two species: the Antarctic toothfish and the Patagonian toothfish, better known to U.S. consumers as Chilean sea bass.
“We had no idea what it was,” Welsford said upon seeing footage of the creature for the first time.
Unlike most sea cucumbers, the headless chicken monster has fins, which allow it to swim upward to escape predators.
“From a research point of view, it’s very interesting, because no one has seen that species that far south before,” Welsford said, adding that discovering the animal near Antarctica could help scientists understand the species’ distribution, and how it might be affected by climate change.
While sightings of the sea cucumber go back to the late 1800s, scientists have “absolutely no idea” how many there are in the world’s oceans, Welsford said. It’s “an amazing reflection of how little we know about the deep ocean.”