Page 62 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October 2015

62 Creatures From Hell
Creature from Hell
Or are their fear-inspiring names
more bark than bite?
VAMPIRE SQUID
Famous deep-sea diver, William Beebe
described an encounter with this “terrible
octopus, black as night, with ivory-white jaws
and blood-red eyes” in his 1926 book The
Arcturus Adventure:
“This came along, half swimming, half
sidling, its eight cupped arms all joined together
by an ebony web. In those icy, black depths, to
be a small fish, and to come within reach of
such sinister arms, to be enfolded by the living
umbrella, and then drawen slowly, irrevocably
toward the wide open, gleaming beak, watched
always by those cruel, lidless eyes, so
frightfully like those of human beings, seemed
to my imagination, a much more awful fate than
could ever befall, in our darkest night, any
creature breathing air.”
Pretty breathless prose for an animal that
is only 6 inches long and “not even slightly
dangerous to humans,” according to
researchers. In gact, the most recent studies
prove that Vampyroteusthis infernalis doesn’t
hunt for prey at all. With the lowest metabolic
rate of any cephalopod, it barely moves.
The vampire squid is a detritvore,
surviving on flakes of organic matter that sink
3,000 feet into the cold, dark, oxygen-minimum
layer where it lives. The particles go by the
poetic name of “marine snow,” by scientists
Henk-Jan Hoving and Bruce robinson at the
Monterey Bay Aquarium Reach Institute say
that it consists of “dead bodies, poop, and snot.”
Like Bela Lugosi, the vampire squid can
hide inside a dark cloak; it literally itself inside them for buoyancy, and its gills are lost after its
out, wrapping it dark mantle around its head
while spraying phosphorescent particles from
the tips of its tentacles and flashing the
bioluminescent chromatophores in its ski,
blinding and confusing predators in the lightless
depths.
Its most remarkable feature is its huge
eyes, proportionately larger than the eyes of any
other animal on Earth. Beebe called them
“blood-red,” but modern biologists say that,
depending on th light source, these “cruel,
lidless eyes” are a charming shade of blue.
HELLBENDERS
Weighing up to 5.5 pounds and
measuring as long as 30 inches, the hellbender
is North America’s largest salamander. It’s no
beauty, unless you like beady eyes and slimy
skin (which may explain one of its nicknames -
the “snot otter”). But “hellbender” seems
overdone for a harmless animal that spends
most of its life in hiding.
Cryptobranchus (“hidden gills”)
alleganiensis looks like something that might
crawl our from under a rock, which is exactly
where it lives in swift-flowing streams primarily
in Missouri and Arkansas and from southern
New York to northern Georgia. In fact,m
hellbenders need a stream with large, flat rocks
under which to hide, and they may stay
underneath the same rock for years, emerging
only at dusk to feed for a few hours.
The hellbender is solitary except during
mating season, and it’s none to friendly even
then. The male excavates a shallow nest under a
rock or log in the streambed and waits for a
female that he can drive into it. He won’t let her
leave until she’s laid 150 - 200 eggs, which he
sprays with his sperm. Then he chases her away
and looks for another female. As many as 1,948
eggs have been found in one nest.
The male guards the nest for 45 to 75
days while the eggs incubate, waving his frills
to ensure them with a rich supply of oxygen.
When the young hatch, he abandons them.
The hellbender has hardly changed in
160 million years. It has lings, but only uses
first year. Ut breathes primarily through its skin, Mars looks very interesting,” said Michael
taking oxygen directly from the water. It has a
rudder like tail, but it doesn’t swim; it walks on
the stream bed. Hence, another nickname: the
“walking catfish.” Its eyesight is so poor that it
hunts by smell. Like some fish, it also has a
“lateral line,” a senory organ that detects
movement.
It feed primarily on crayfish and is
preyed upon by fish, snakes, turtles, and other
hellbenders, who cannibalize the eggs.
What good is it? The hellbender is an
“indicator species”: It can survive only in clean,
well-oxygenated streams, which explains why
pollution, disease, and dam building have
reduced the hellbender population by an
estimated 77 percent since the 1970s. Zoos in
Nashville and St. Louis are the first to succeed
in hatching hellbenders, so future generations of
children may yet find them - and run screaming
from the water.
DEVIL WORMS
When geomicrobiologist Tullis Onstott of
Princeton University found minuscule worms
living in a South African gold mine nearly a mile
below the surface, he was so surprised that he
called in a Belgian nematode specialist, Gaetan
Borgonie, to confirm his findings. In 2011, they
published their observations, naming the worms
Halicephalobus mephisto, after Mephistopheles,
the demonic spirit in Goethe’s Faust. In Greek,
the name means, “he who loves not the light.”
Mephisto is a new species that eats
biofilms (“layers of gelatinous goo” on rocks)
and requires only traces of oxygen. Although the
worm is not more than half a millimeter long,
Onstott likened its discovery to finding Moby
Dick in Lake Ontario.
It is the first multi cellular organism to
be found so far beneath the surface of the earth.
Isotope dating of the water in rock fractures
were the species was found proved that the
water was 3,000 to 12,000 years old and had
been as warm as 118° F. No one suspected that
life could be found in such a hot, oxygen starved
environment.
“I doubt if this nematode sprang from
Hell,” commented evolutionary biologist Byron
Adams of Bingham Young University. “It more
likely evolved at Earth’s surface, with the arrest
of the Nematoda.”
With this discovery, “the deep surface of
Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars
Exploration Program. “The universe might have
many more habitats than we thought.” []