Giant bugs tear the 2,000-meter-deep sea crocodile

Big football-like footbills are caught gobbling up the crocodile's body until it can't move.

Video by remote operation vehicle (ROV) filmed at a depth of 2,000 meters in the Gulf of Mexico recorded giant evenly (Bathynomus) enjoying a free meal of crocodile carcasses. The research team led by Craig McClain and Clifton Nunnally, Louisiana Marine Consortium University (LUMCON), conducted experiments to understand the physical process from the ground environment enriching the food chain in the deep sea.

Legs are all stripping the crocodile.

In this experiment, the material on the ground is the body of three crocodiles. The giant foot-like beetles quickly pulled to the party in less than a day after the crocodile's body appeared. This crustacean species has distant relatives with a large, ball-like capsule. Using extremely strong jaws, they tore meat, devoured the crocodile's body until it was almost impossible to move.

The deep-sea- like foot buds depend heavily on food falling from the water. These are dead marine animals that die and fall to the ocean floor, including whales, dolphins, sea lions, large fish such as tuna, shark and rays, but also plants and woods. or crocodile carcasses from the mainland. In the video filmed in February, scientists used the reptile for the first time to examine the role of crocodiles in the deep sea biodiversity and carbon cycle, according to McClain.

Crocodile seems to be a strange choice for this type of experiment, but they act as good representatives to study the food network in the past. Crocodiles are closely related to large marine reptiles that lived millions of years ago, including sea turtles, long-legged lilies and plesiosaurs.

In order to conduct the experiment, McClain and Nunnally searched for the three recently killed crocodiles in Louisiana. They are about 2 - 2.5 meters long. The team placed crocodile carcasses in three different locations in the Gulf of Mexico, with a depth of nearly 2,400 meters.

The footage shows just how fast giant giant footbills detect and approach crocodile carcasses. They grab and tear the crocodile's thick skin with a specially modified jaw. Large cuts appeared on the crocodile's body, revealing the ribs. A pair of giant foot-like bugs also crawled into the crocodile's body, eating corpses from inside.

Giant footbills have the ability to store accumulated energy through food. After this meal, they will not need to eat for months, even years. Researchers will return to place crocodile carcasses after two months to check what remains.