Whatever This Is Caught On Camera In Southern Hemisphere For The First Time

The ocean: it’s a huge wet place where we store all of our most fucked creatures. There is certainly no shortage of fucked creatures to be found on land, but the ocean plumbs a depth of fuckedness that cannot reasonably be contested by anything terrestrial. Held together by a combination of sheer weirdness and the reduced effects of gravity, impossible shapes constructed of goop and tendrils float suspended in the inky blackness, just waiting to wash up onshore and mystify beachgoers.

Glowing things with too many eyes. Transparent things with no eyes at all. Arcane accumulations of ganglia and sensory protrusions skittering in the blackness. White featureless worms congregating in clustered bouquets around volcanic vents. Immense blind sharks living ponderous, solitary lives, gumming at brine-pickled whale carcasses. And this fucken guy:


Pictured: Something squishy, this way coming. (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

That amorphous bag of gelatinous nonsense is Enypniastes eximia — known more popularly as the Spanish dancer sea cucumber or (and we are being very serious about this) the headless chicken monster. Presumably, the thing is so named because of the way it is propelled through the water by eddies and currents, and also because it looks like an absolute nightmare.

For the first time, this submarine nightmare has been captured on video in the southern hemisphere, after researchers in the government’s Australian Antarctic Division papped one swimming around in the Southern Ocean off the coast of East Antarctica.

In a statement, program leader Dr Dirk Welsford said that the creature was captured by a camera system designed to attach to commercial fishing lines:

The housing that protects the camera and electronics is designed to attach to toothfish longlines in the Southern Ocean, so it needs to be extremely durable.

We needed something that could be thrown from the side of a boat, and would continue operating reliably under extreme pressure in the pitch black for long periods of time.

Some of the footage we are getting back from the cameras is breathtaking, including species we have never seen in this part of the world. Most importantly, the cameras are providing important information about areas of sea floor that can withstand this type of fishing, and sensitive areas that should be avoided.

Welsford did not provide specific comment on how fucked the creature is. You can see this oddball fucker swimming around in the video below:

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