This squid may have one of the more nasty diets in the animal kingdom, but it also has one of the most badass names. Check out this story on Discovery News about a cephalopod called Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which translates to, "vampire squid from hell." Yeah, that's right. It gets its name from it's cloak-like appearance and has a truly remarkable way of gathering food.
From the story:
This sole species of the Order Vampyromorpha lives between 2,000 to 3,000 feet below the ocean surface in waters with very low levels of oxygen.
Living fossils are animals that have been on Earth for ages, surviving all major extinction events and not seeming to change very much over millions of years. The eclectic diet of the vampire squid, described in a paper published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, likely hasn't changed much either.
The squid eats "the dead bodies of crustaceans, moults (shedded outer layers) of crustaceans, fecal pellets of zooplankton, parts of gelatinous organisms like the discarded mucus houses of larvaceans, fish scales, foraminifera (single celled marine organisms), pieces of jellyfish and salps, eggs, micro algae, radiolarians (another type of singe celled aquatic animal)," and other marine waste, according to co-author Henk-Jan Hoving, a postdoctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
For many years, the vampire squid has puzzled scientists, both because of this bizarre diet and because of its pair of long, slender threadlike appendages that dangle from the squid's body. The squid live in tropical and temperate regions of the world's oceans. They lack feeding tentacles, but they do possess eight arms.
…"The vampire squid deploys a long filament- up to 8 times the animal's body size, and marine detrital matter falling through the water column adheres to the filament," Hoving explained to Discovery News. "The filament is retrieved between the arms of the vampire squid and the food is cleaned off."
Read the full story here.