This large, predatory stomatopod crustacean has the most complex eyes in the world. If a person can distinguish 3 primary colors, then the mantis crab can distinguish 12. Also, these animals perceive ultraviolet and infrared light and see different types polarization of light. During an attack, the mantis crayfish makes several quick strikes with its legs, causing serious damage to the victim or killing it. Capable of striking with its claws with the force of a 22-caliber bullet, some particularly large specimens of mantis crabs are capable of breaking glass with one or a couple of blows to it.
23. Giant isopod
Giant isopods can reach 76 cm in length and weigh about 1.7 kg. They have a tough calcareous exoskeleton made up of overlapping segments and can roll into a “ball” for protection from predators. Usually the food is carrion; they can live up to 5 years without food.
22. Frilled shark
A dangerous creature native to the Cretaceous period. This shark hunts like snakes, bending its body and making a sharp lunge forward. Long and very mobile jaws allow large prey to be swallowed whole, while numerous rows of small and needle-sharp teeth prevent it from escaping.
21. Black Crookshanks
This fish is capable of swallowing prey 10 times heavier and twice as long as itself. Sometimes these fish swallow prey that they are unable to digest. The decomposition of the swallowed prey begins, and the accumulated gases cause the death of the predator and raise it to the surface of the water
20. Deep sea anglerfish
19. Holothurians
These sea cucumbers are unusual in that they never touch the seabed, but instead drift in the water. Holothurians feed on plankton and organic debris. The mouth of the holothurian is surrounded by a corolla of 10-30 tentacles, which serve to capture food, and leads into a spirally twisted intestine.
18. Tunicates
An underwater version of the Venus flytrap. In the waiting state, their hunting apparatus is straightened, but if a small animal swims there, the “lips” are compressed like a trap, sending the prey to the stomach. To lure prey, they use bioluminescence as bait.
17. Sea Dragon
This fish with a huge mouth lined with sharp, crooked teeth uses bioluminescence to lure prey. Having caught a prey, the sea dragon's color darkens in order to camouflage itself from other predators and enjoy the prey.
16. Pacific viperfish
The mouth is armed with huge teeth protruding from the mouth. Luminous organs (photophores) are also scattered on the head and body, which help them hunt and distinguish their relatives. With the help of teeth, the victim is held tightly in the mouth and, when the jaws are closed, they are pushed into the esophagus, in the front part of which there are several curved spines. The long, pouch-like stomach of these fish can easily accommodate even large prey, which allows them to wait for the next successful hunt. Hauliodas eat approximately once every 12 days.
15. Swima
The most amazing representatives of polychaete worms. Worms are distinguished by the presence of small formations glowing with a greenish light, resembling drops in shape. These tiny bombs can be thrown away, distracting the enemy in an emergency for several seconds, giving the worms a chance to escape.
14. Hell Vampire
A small deep-sea mollusk. The hellvampire usually measures about 15 cm in length. Adults have a pair of ear-shaped fins growing from the sides of the mantle, which serve as their main means of locomotion. Almost the entire surface of the mollusk’s body is covered with luminescent organs - photophores. The hellish vampire has very good control over these organs and is capable of producing disorienting flashes of light lasting from hundredths of a second to several minutes. In addition, it can control the brightness and size of the color spots.
13. Stargazers
They got their name from their upward-pointing eyes. They are the only perciformes known to produce strong (up to 50 V) electrical discharges. They usually lie on the bottom, buried almost entirely in the ground, and lie in wait for prey. Some lure it with a special vermiform appendage at the bottom of the mouth.
Sea angel (lat. Clione limacina)- a species of gastropod molluscs from the order Holotelida (Gymnosomata). sea angels live in the cold waters of the Northern Hemisphere. Drop to a depth of five hundred meters somewhere off the snow-covered shores of Alaska or Northern Europe, in the Arctic or Pacific Ocean, in the north Atlantic, and you will come face to face with this ancient mollusk, which, like centuries ago, gracefully cuts through the surface of the water with a pair of small outgrowths resembling tiny angel wings.
Only in appearance they are angels, these predatory pelagic organisms that specialize in feeding on “sea devils” - mollusks from the genus Limacina.
Eating a relative occurs according to a strictly planned scheme - first, three tenacious tentacles are used, which cling to the victim with a death grip and turn the mouth of the shell towards the mouth of the “angel”, then six sharp hooks covered with chitin, located in special bags of the oral cavity, are connected.
Massive aggregations of these mollusks can serve as food for toothless whales and seabirds.
Body sea angels (Clione limacina) It is torpedo-shaped and almost transparent. Its length is usually 2-2.5 cm, sometimes reaching 4 cm. The head, well delimited from the body, bears two pairs of tentacles. The first pair is located on the sides of the mouth located at the anterior end of the body. The second, bearing rudimentary eyes, is on the dorsal side of the head, closer to its rear edge. Like other Gymnosomata, angelfish lack a shell, mantle cavity, and gills. The leg undergoes a significant reduction: only a pair of locomotor outgrowths (parapodia) and a small formation on the ventral side of the body immediately behind the head are preserved. Like this angelfish)
Maybe it’s not for nothing that they say that “the devils are muddying the waters”? Oh, this is what monkfish looks like? You know, it’s not scary at all!
Is the devil food for the angel?
If you take a look at our earthly fauna, you will see that our nature is a great dreamer! It must be said that researchers do not lag behind nature, coming up with unimaginable names for some animals. For example, among sea mollusks there are angelfish and monkfish. Although there is also fish. Well, if the appearance of the sea angel somehow fits the name, then why the other mollusk was called the little devil is completely unclear. Quite a cute creature. And his behavior is completely inappropriate for the devil...
Another name for monkfish is Limacina. This is a species of gastropod mollusk belonging to the order Thecosomata. Monkfish is a member of the Limacina family, genus Limacina.
The appearance of this animal is absolutely harmless. This is a very small mollusk - the body length often does not exceed 1.5 centimeters. Rarely are specimens growing up to three centimeters. The diameter of the mollusk shell is only 4 millimeters. It is not entirely clear why the Limacina shell is needed at all, because it does not perform a protective function. She is very fragile and thin.
The body of the animal has a blackish-violet tint, which sometimes shimmers with purple. The animal's wings have more light tone than the rest of the body. The shell is colored brownish and has 5 whorls.
Where does monkfish live?
For a comfortable life, these mollusks need very cold waters, so their habitat is the waters of the Atlantic (northern zones) and Arctic oceans.
Lifestyle of the devil clam
Perhaps the only thing that the monkfish has in common with its name is its predatory nature. The mollusk has special glands that secrete a sticky substance resembling mucus. With the help of this mucus, the limacina, just like a spider, weaves a network into which its prey is caught. It is this that becomes the monkfish’s “dinner”.
In addition, such a net keeps the animal itself afloat. If not for this device, the weight of the shell would have pulled the mollusk to the bottom. Do you know at what speed the animal will fly down in this case? As much as 25 km/h! At that speed, an adult is riding a bicycle fast! The wings also help the mollusk stay at a certain depth. By adding or decreasing the frequency of strokes, Limacina regulates immersion.
When darkness falls, the monkfish rises closer to the surface of the ocean. The animal does this in order to feed on plankton, which gathers in large flocks in the upper layers of water at night. But the rest of the time his life passes at a depth of no more than 100 meters.
If the limacina senses danger, it suddenly falls like a stone to the bottom. But she is not always able to escape the pursuit of a predator, and she becomes someone’s “dinner dish.”
What does Limacina eat?
Weaving our underwater networks, monkfish ki wait until food collects in them: larvae, small crustaceans, plankton, bacteria.
How do monkfish reproduce?
And this is a sea angel - an eater of monkfish. This process has been poorly studied by researchers of the ocean depths. It is only known that limacines lay egg clutches numbering hundreds of eggs. The eggs are connected to each other by a jelly-like substance and form a kind of plate.
Angels and devils are pteropods. Sea angels, or sea angels (Clione limacina), live mainly in the cold waters of the northern seas, beyond the Arctic Circle. This is a circumpolar species, that is, living at both poles, both under the ice of the Arctic and off the coast of Antarctica. In the northern hemisphere, the number of its representatives is much larger. The angelfish leads a planktonic lifestyle, swimming in the water column, from the murky depths of a thousand or more meters to the very surface. Wide, flattened wings help it swim - once upon a time, a long time ago, a crawling leg turned into them (hence the name of the group of mollusks - pteropods). Swimming in the water column and actively feeding, clyons quite quickly grow to their maximum size, which is only 4–5 centimeters. Afterwards, they begin to accumulate what they have eaten and digested in the form of subcutaneous fat drops, which is why a well-fed adult angel is dotted with small light dots.
Sea angels are extremely active predators, and their only prey is another pteropod - monkfish.Klion's nutrition is one of its most amazing features. Angels are extremely active predators, and their only prey is another pteropod, Limacina helicina, which is called monkfish for its dark, almost black color. Compared to angels, devils are very tiny - the size of their shell rarely exceeds a few millimeters, on average only two or three. Angels swim serenely almost all the time, slowly flapping their wings. But as soon as a devil appears nearby, the head of the clyon instantly splits in two, and six huge orange hooks turn out of it - buccal cones covered with small rough tubercles. At the same time, the Klion begins to frantically flap its wings and swim in circles. As soon as the unfortunate victim touches one of the buccal cones, the angel collapses them, and the little devil is squeezed, as if between the fingers of two hands. Inside the head, in the center, there is another pair of hook-shaped jaws hidden, as well as a radula - a special chitinous “grater” with teeth, which is used for grinding food. Almost all known mollusks have it. After the angel grabs the devil, he needs to turn the mouth of the shell in such a way as to pull out the food from there. Despite the fact that the Limacina shell is very thin and fragile, only a large angel can break it. To rotate the shell into a comfortable position, the angel unclenches the buccal cones for half a second, then contracts again, and so on several times; In these seconds, the devil tries to escape, but every time he is caught, without even having time to flap his wings. Finally, he turns the way the angel needs, and he begins to eat. Hard hooks of the jaws pull the soft body of the mollusk out of the shell, and the radula grinds it into a puree, which enters the esophagus into the large stomach. The process of eating the devil is far from fast, so the angel continues to swim calmly, holding its prey between the halves of its head. If the predator is still small, only a couple of times larger than its prey, then it looks very comical - it swims as if in a helmet, with a devil on its head, since there is no other way to hold the captive - when the prey is caught, the buccal cones are retracted . Angels are quite voracious: in a season, one individual eats up to five hundred devils! From time to time there are unusual outbreaks in the numbers of both devils and angels. There were cases when there were more than 300 angels per cubic meter of water. The density of devils at times also exceeds all reasonable limits, and the sea becomes like an oversaturated living broth, when at low tide hundreds and thousands of these small pteropods remain in each puddle. It is surprising that, according to all observations, except for devils, angels do not eat anything at all. But devils appear en masse in the sea for a very short period of time - only two to three weeks at the end of spring - after which they disappear. Scientific research showed that on fat reserves accumulated during active feeding, angels are able to live without food for three to four months, but what they eat the rest of the time is a mystery, as well as where they go. After all, after the influx of devils, many angels immediately appear, and then they simply disappear from the plankton and are found very rarely. Despite the fact that back in the 19th century angels were subjected to detailed anatomical studies, and for half of the 20th century their physiology was very seriously studied, the full life cycle of these creatures, from birth to death, is unknown to science. No one can still explain their sudden disappearance. It is believed that they go deep and spend most of the year there. Unfortunately, their life cycle is extremely difficult to trace, since the necessary observations require expensive manned underwater vehicles with photo and video cameras and a lot of time and effort. “Animals living in the water column are very poorly studied,” says BBS director Alexander Tsetlin. – The fact is that even if they can be kept for some time in marine aquariums, they only survive there. To learn something about their behavior, nutrition, vision and other senses, you need to study them in their natural environment. That is, floating in the water with them, observing, photographing.” How do sea angels live and what do they do at great depths? BBS scientists find this mystery damn interesting and watch them from year to year.
