Vampire ink clears the sea

Despite the terrifying nickname, vampire ink doesn't suck the blood of animals and even helps the ocean become cleaner.

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The vampire ink (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) is a member of the head-layer animal and lives at a depth of 550-1,100 m under the ocean. Their maximum body length is about 30 cm. They are widely distributed in the ocean, but scientists know very little about them. They are called vampire ink because of the red eyes and the membrane between their tentacles. Vampire ink doesn't need much oxygen, so they can live in waters with low oxygen levels.

Henk-Jan Hoving, a scientist from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in the US, and his colleagues followed vampire ink in the lab and watched videos of their activities in Monterey Bay to find out. More about them. The videos, totaling 24 hours, were filmed from 1992 to 2012.

They discovered that vampire ink preyed by sucking things floating in deep water - like eggs, larvae, corpses and body parts of marine animals. Squid covered the food with mucus before swallowing, Livescience reported.

'This is the first time that scientists have discovered a headless animal that does not hunt for life,' Hoving said.

The feathers on the tentacles of vampire ink release mucus. When the membrane
The skin connects the expansion tentacles, small pieces of meat will cling to the hairs.

After vampire ink body surgery, the team found that they did not use attraction to catch prey. Instead, their tentacles shed mucus.

'When looking for prey, the 8-limb skin membrane of vampire ink will expand so that the pieces of meat stick to the feathers on the tentacles , ' Hoving explained.

Although the body size is small, the vampire ink has huge eyes. Their eyes have an average diameter of 2.5 cm - equivalent to the eyes of a large sized dog. Depending on the lighting conditions, their eyes are red or blue. Their body colors also change constantly from black to light red according to the location and lighting conditions.

The body of vampire ink is almost covered by light-producing organs called photophore. Squid can control these organs to create flashes in a period of several hundred seconds to several minutes. They can also change the size and intensity of photophores.