I’m a piglet squid – and before you ask, yes, I am a real squid. I don’t do much fast swimming or jetting about like my cousins. I’m more of a float-and-drift kind of squid. And I’ve got a round, jiggly body and a face that (apparently!) looks a bit like a piglet. Rude, but fair. I also float around upside down – I know it looks funny, but it helps me stay balanced.
I live far beneath the waves, in the twilight and midnight zones – places where sunlight never reaches, the pressure could squash a car, and the water’s barely above freezing! Down here, I drift slowly
through the darkness with the help of my special buoyancy sac – it’s like an inbuilt floaty balloon inside my body. I’ve got glowing lights under my eyes (they’re called photophores), and I even carry an ink sac, just in case I need to make a quick getaway. Not bad for such a squishy little squid, right?
This issue is packed with amazing stories from the deep – vampire squid with glowing capes, jellyfish with ruby-red bellies, whale skeleton cities, and epic battles between giant squid and sperm whales. You’ll meet explorers (some with tentacles, some with torches), see what life is like in total darkness, and discover how deep-sea creatures survive in a world of extremes.
We deep-sea dwellers may not get many visitors, but we’ve got stories to tell. So dive in (not literally – it’s over 1,000 metres deep here!) and discover our world of glowing lights, slippery creatures and epic survival skills.
See you in the deep, Piglet the Piglet Squid (The only squid who naps upside down)
HOMES IN THE DEEP
All life needs the SUN, right? Er, no!
In the deepest parts of the ocean, there is NO light, hardly any oxygen, and the temperature drops to just 3°C. Plants cannot grow in this cold, watery darkness – but, amazingly, other life thrives here! Scientists keep discovering strange and surprising creatures in the deep, many of them completely new to science. Wow! How do they do it?
This is not a place humans can easily visit. In fact, more people have travelled into space than have been to the very bottom of the ocean. But new technology means there are now underwater vehicles that can visit places that are impossible for humans to reach…
Let’s take a look at some remarkable habitats in the dark depths of the vast, mysterious ocean.
WHALE FALL
That’s the name given to the body of a dead whale when it sinks to the seabed. These whale corpses are usually found in the abyssal zone – between 2,000 and 6,000 metres deep. It’s the largest habitat on Earth!
Whale fall is a fantastic food source for deep-dwelling marine creatures – the flesh from a 35-ton carcass can last for two years! And the giant bones become a habitat that lasts for many years after that.
After scavengers have eaten all the whale flesh, the skeleton makes an ideal house
for invertebrates, such as sea anemones. They cling to the bones and soak up the nutrients left inside.
The bones contain nourishment for animals like the ZOMBIE WORM (eek!). These gruesome-sounding creatures prefer bones to brains! But they don’t have a mouth or stomach, so how do they eat? They send out tendrils to extract fat from the bones – that’s how! But wait, it gets even weirder: only the females eat! Meanwhile, about 100 teeny-tiny males live inside each female.
As the bones decay, a chemical reaction produces sulphide – a favourite snack for mussels, tube worms and many more. This stage can last up to 50 years! Even the leftover sludge on the ocean floor gets a boost. What a brilliant natural fertiliser!
Fun Fact
A single whale skeleton can support 30,000 organisms!
Vocabulary
Corpse: A dead body. Invertebrate: An animal with no backbone.
Nourishment: Food necessary for good health and growth.
by
Illustration
Alan Marks
Zombie worm
HYDROTHERMAL VENTS
Geysers are hot springs that blast boiling water into the air. Hydrothermal vents are just like that – but underwater!
Volcanic activity heats seawater to a sizzling 400°C (scorchio!). That super-hot water then pushes up through cracks in the ocean floor, picking up metals and minerals along the way. When it hits the icy cold seawater, these chemicals harden into a solid chimney.
Scientists first discovered hydrothermal vents in 1977, in the Galápagos Rift, about 2,500 metres deep. Until then, most people thought nothing could live without sunlight.
But life was thriving around these vents! So, how were these creatures surviving with no sunlight and no plants?
The answer: hydrogen sulphide – a toxic chemical that smells like rotten eggs. Some bacteria can turn this poisonous stuff into energy.
And those bacteria are the base of a food chain that includes giant tube worms,
blind shrimp and other weird and wonderful creatures!
Hydrothermal vents don’t last forever. They might stay active for only a few decades before cooling down or collapsing.
But while they last, they’re bursting with energy and life. Some creatures, like tube worms, grow very quickly – reaching up to two metres long! Scientists think this fast growth helps them make the most of the vent while it’s still active.
Scientists still don’t fully understand how these animals survive in such extreme heat and toxic water. But they’ve discovered that some vent-dwelling animals are more like prehistoric creatures than the ones we see near the surface today.
Could this be where life on Earth began? And if life can survive here, might it survive on other planets, too?
Fun Fact
Approximately 300 species live around hydrothermal vents, and 95% of them were new to science when they were
When tectonic plates move, they create cracks in the Earth’s crust. At some of these cracks, cold liquids full of chemicals slowly seep out into the sea. These are called cold seeps
They’re similar to hydrothermal vents –but they’re not hot.
Cold seeps can stay active for a very long time – even hundreds or thousands of years. This stable environment means animals living there don’t need to move around much and can grow and live very slowly.
Some of these deep-sea creatures are among the longest-living animals on Earth. The seep tube worm, for example, can live for 250 years or more!
Fun Fact
There are cold seeps all over the world, and the deepest ever found was near Japan, at around 6,500 metres deep!
Vocabulary
Decade: A period of 10 years. Tectonic plates: Giant pieces of the Earth’s outer layer that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and slowly move around.
SEAMOUNTS
Seamounts are underwater mountains! They form when tectonic plates move and lava erupts through cracks in the ocean floor. As the lava cools and hardens, it builds up into volcanoes and mountains.
Scientists think seamounts cover more of Earth’s surface than all dry land habitats combined. There are around 100,000 seamounts across the world’s oceans!
The tallest mountain on Earth is actually a seamount. It’s called Mauna Kea, and it rises over nine kilometres from the seabed near Hawaii – making it even taller than Mount Everest, which stands at about 8.8 km above sea level.
Although seamounts have been known for decades, many were only mapped in detail after 2000, thanks to high-tech sonar. We now know just how many there are – and we’re still discovering more!
Known as underwater oases, seamounts offer a solid surface for sea creatures to cling to. Crabs, corals, brittle stars and sea lilies make their homes on the rocky sides, creating even more nooks and crannies for other animals to live in.
Food is plentiful here, too. Ocean currents swirl around the mounts, carrying nutrients and minerals up from the deep. Some peaks even rise above the surface into the sunlight – while others stay hidden in the darkness below.
Fun Fact
Over 1,300 species live on seamounts and many are unique to each mount, like individual islands.
Sea star on coral on a seamount
Charlie Meets…
By JD Savage
A Lanternfish (and a Deep-Sea Jellyfish)!
It’s me, Charlie, the Eco Kid who can chat with animals. This time, I set out to interview a flashy fish – and discovered Earth’s largest animal migration!
Charlie: I’ve come to Monterey Bay, one of North America’s closest-to-the-shore deep ocean environments.
A lanternfish is one of the many deep-sea creatures I’ve always wanted to interview – and lots live here. But how could I interview any deep-sea animals? I’m no diver – and it’s unsafe for me to go down so deep.
Well, I came up with a way – and I don’t even have to get wet. I’m sending a robot! I stay up on the ship while my remotecontrolled robot buddy here dives down to as deep as 1,000 metres into the ocean’s dark, spooky ‘twilight zone’.
It’s got my face on a waterproof display screen and it has speakers, so the animals can see and hear me. The robot also streams them right back up to me. It’s like a deep-sea FaceTime! Genius, eh?
Hey, there’s a lanternfish! Check out those tiny glowing spots. They’re called photophores (“fo-toe-fours”), and they’re like built-in fairy lights. A chemical reaction creates that blue-green light.
Excuse me!
Lanternfish: Woah. What kind of sea creature are you?
Charlie: I’m not. I’m Charlie from the surface. But I’m talking to you through my robot here. Fancy a chat?
Lanternfish: Hmm. Weird. But OK.
Charlie: Why do you flash those lights here in the dark? Don’t they alert predators to where you are?
Lanternfish: Well, it’s not completely dark at this level.
Charlie: You’re right, it’s not pitch black.
Lanternfish: Faint specks of light still drift down and my belly lights help me blend in. They match the pattern of specks as they glow downwards – so if a predator peers up at me from below, they think I’m just more sunny speckles.
Illustration by Leah Ingledew
Charlie: Clever!
Lanternfish: But I don’t spend all my time down here, you know.
Charlie: You don’t?
Lanternfish: No, at night, lots – and I do mean lots – of us swim up towards the surface to forage for food in the shallow waters. Lots of predators hunt us then. During the day, we plunge back into the deep to avoid them.
Charlie: So, I didn’t need a robot? I could have just waited for you to swim up?
Lanternfish: No, we don’t swim that high. I bet we’d still be too deep – and small – for you to even see us from a boat.
Charlie: You also have glowing photophores along your sides and all around your body, too. Why?
Lanternfish: Maaaaaybe they help us identify our own species in the dark. Maaaaaybe they help us keep track of each other when we’re swimming in schools. Maaaaaybe they help to attract mates – and startle predators. But we have to keep some secrets.
Fun Fact
About 60% of all deep-sea fish are lanternfish – at least 240 species!
Lanternfish: Trust him to steal the spotlight.
Charlie: I have a question for you, too. You amazing jellyfish always have blood-red bellies – but how does that hide you?
Comb Jelly: Because here, red blends in with the dark waters and looks black. It also masks the glowing prey I’ve eaten. If you weren’t flashing those lights around, I’d be nearly invisible. So turn ’em off!
FACT-CHECKER CHARLIE!
Hey, the bloody-belly comb jelly was right!
Hardly any sunlight reaches the deep-sea zone, and its red colours fade out first as the light travels down. Without any red light to reflect down there, jellies with red bodies appear black against the dark water, and blend right in.
Luckily, my robot has its own lights (including red), which revealed the jelly’s true colour!
Comb Jelly: Oi! What’s going on here?
Charlie: Wow, it’s a ruby-coloured bloodybelly comb jelly.
In the 1950s, scientists tried to measure ocean depths using new sonar tech –and were shocked that the entire seafloor seemed to rise at night. Turned out it was billions of (mostly) lanternfish migrating upwards to feed!
Which Should We Explore: The Deep Sea or Outer Space?
By JD Savage
Amy: People often say we know more about the moon than our own ocean.
Simon: Yep. We’ve mapped the moon’s surface in amazing detail.
Amy: But we know much less about our ocean’s deepest parts. Well, there’s only so much money available for exploring. Which is most important to explore, then: the deep sea or outer space?
Rhona: The deep sea! There’s more life in the ocean than anywhere else on Earth. But we’ve found no definite sign of life in outer space.
Simon: Only because we haven’t explored it enough!
Charlie: I say the deep sea – I want to chat with more creatures from the depths!
Simon: Come on, outer space has exploding stars and black holes. There’s even a planet in our galaxy that might be made of diamonds! Weirdness detectives like me live for the great unknown.
Rhona: The deep sea is the great unknown. I bet we’ll find countless creatures we haven’t even discovered yet.
When I’m prime minister, I’m funding deep-sea exploration.
Rusty: And when I’m a top Hollywood director, I'm making sci-fi movies about weird aliens with mind-blowing powers. Outer space rules!
Rhona: You mean alien powers like, say, spitting glowing green clouds? Or how about creatures dropping light bombs from just behind their heads?
Rusty: Great ones, Rhona! I’ll just need to borrow a few million quid for the special effects.
Simon: Watch out, Rusty, she’s setting you up…
Rhona: Both those creatures exist in our deep sea. There’s a shrimp that spits out glowing chemicals to confuse predators, and bomber worms that release bright green light bombs when they’re attacked.
Parapandalus shrimp: lighting up the sea to dodge danger!
Illustration by Alan Marks
Amy: True, you don’t need to travel to distant planets to find alien-like creatures. The deep sea is full of them!
Rhona: Exactly – have you ever seen pictures of goosefish, dragonfish or sea angels?
Rusty: Sea angels???
Rhona: They’re deep-sea swimming snails without shells. They have see-through skin so you can see their pinky-orange insides.
Simon: OK, that’s pleasingly weird.
Charlie: The ocean’s definitely more important. The seafloor holds loads of clues about climate change and how it’s affecting our planet.
Rhona: Bang on, Charlie! When we study how carbon sinks into the deep sea, we learn how Earth removes it from the air. That helps us figure out ways to do it better ourselves.
Charlie: And fight global warming!
An alien? No, a goosefish!
Amy: Exactly. Plus, the seabed keeps a diary of ancient climate disasters. If we read it right, we can spot warning signs. Maybe even find ways to stop it from happening again.
Simon: OK, OK, so if the deep sea’s sooooooo important, why haven’t we explored it more? I mean, it’s right here on Earth!
Rhona: Because it’s super-hard to send humans deep underwater. There’s no sunlight down there, so there’s total darkness. And incredible pressures that could crush you.
Rusty: Yeah, like that drink can I crushed yesterday. Instant crush doom!
Rhona: Rusty, please. It took you at least three hours and a weird purple face to crush that little can.
Rusty: It took three seconds! And I looked like a superhero.
Bachström/Alamy
Rhona: Imagine if we could only explore the rainforests by helicopter, Simon. And we had to send down remote-controlled robots to gather data. Or send a human for just 30 minutes or so before yanking them out again.
Charlie: We’d know so much less about those forests.
Rhona: That’s how tough the deep sea is for humans to visit.
Simon: But what if anything happens to our planet? We have to colonise other planets out there. Humans need to become a multi-planet species, spread across the galaxy.
Rhona: Our DustBuster exploded when it tried to clean Rusty’s room.
Simon: Even deep-sea explorer robots were inspired by space mission robots.
Rusty: I’m all for that! I wouldn’t be able to hear Rhona moaning from another planet. Also, I might get to live on a planet that has dinosaurs. SPACE DINOSAURS!
Charlie: But that’s the future. We might find new medicines and vaccines in the ocean to save lives right now.
Simon: But space helps Earth right now, too. Loads of great stuff was invented for space missions first. Water filters, camera phones, wireless headsets, artificial limbs… Even DustBuster cordless vacuum cleaners!
Charlie: Space just seems so far away…
Simon: But everything on Earth began in space, so the more we learn about the galaxies, the more we discover about our own planet.
Amy: I’ve thought of another way the two connect. A few planets’ moons in our solar system seem to have underground oceans. Maybe one day, people will be exploring those.
Simon: Exploring space and deep sea at the same time!
Amy: It seems exploring both helps us understand everything better. I wonder what our readers think…
Rusty: Oh, yes, our readers. I forgot to say: hi, Rusty fans!
Scaleless Black Dragonfish
Too Dark to Spot - Too Fast to Escape!
This fierce deep-sea fish is almost invisible in the dark. Its skin absorbs nearly all light, making it vanish into the blackness. Only the female has those scary teeth and a glowing lure to trick prey. The male has no teeth or stomach, and never eats. He lives just long enough to mate!
This deep-sea jellyfish lives in the cold Arctic Ocean and can shoot through the water like a rocket using sudden jet blasts. You can even see signals zipping through its see-through body as its nerve cells send messages!
@Alexander Semenov
Wildlife News!
Lots of classy news about rewilding from me this time, plus how we’re learning animal languages and lots more. (Oh, and I expect my annoying little brother Rusty will write about poo again.)
Rhona Reports! N0. 65
EPIC ADVENTURES!
From Cornwall to France and Devon to Ireland, the Cornish Seal Sanctuary’s rescued seal pups are on the move!
As another busy pup rescue season wraps up, a brilliant new GPS tagging project is tracking their progress and adventures at sea.
Each year, the sanctuary rescues pups who are sick, injured or abandoned, and gives them expert care until they’re strong enough to return to UK waters. But until now, no one really knew what happened to them once they swam off into the waves.
The GPS tags are safely attached to their fur with a special glue and naturally
And don’t forget about me – Rusty!
Rhona’s helper: JD Savage
fall off when the seals moult between December and April.
The very first tagged pup, Maggot, made an unexpected dash across the sea to Brittany, France – over 150 miles away! But Selkie, rescued from Jersey in January, became the first tracked seal pup to cross international waters, swimming up the River Somme in northern France before settling along the eastern English Channel.
Then there’s Dung Beetle, released in south Cornwall, who’s now exploring the southern coast of Ireland. Meanwhile, two other tagged pups – JP and Bug – are staying closer to
home, feeding along the Cornish coast.
Knowing these pups are doing so well in the wild is perfect proof that the sanctuary’s work truly makes a difference!
What’s all this about releasing and tracking maggots and dung beetles in the wild?
Rusty, please read my items properly – don’t just SKIM them!!!
NEWSFLASH!
In Australia, quickthinking locals spent nearly an hour rescuing a stranded great white shark, guiding it safely back to the deep!
NEWSFLASH!
Lots of foxes are using a primary school playground in Lincoln, England, as a toilet. Teachers are trying to puzzle out how to stop them!
NEWSFLASH!
Newborn pilot whales were spotted swimming among pods of orcas in Iceland. Scientists aren’t sure why or how the whale calves got there!
MISSING MAMMALS TO RETURN?
What if some of Britain’s lost wild animals made a comeback? Some wildlife experts think they should –and they’ve been awarded funding to help it happen!
Rewilding Britain is supporting a bunch of exciting projects hoping to bring back European elk (which our North American readers call moose), bison and beavers to wild parts of the UK.
These are keystone species – animals that help to shape whole ecosystems just by doing what comes naturally. Beavers build watery homes that create wetlands full of life.
And elk and bison graze and trample through woodlands, helping young trees grow.
One team in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire is looking into the idea of elk and beavers living side by side in the same wild space – something that hasn’t happened in the UK in 3,000 years!
In Kent, another project is planning to reintroduce bison to a new site after their first success in the Wilder Blean woods. And up in the Highlands, conservationists are working with local people to rehome more beavers in the north of my wonderful country Scotland.
It’s early days and will take loads of planning and research – but it’s a big, bold step towards making Britain a wilder place again.
Yes, and bring back sabretoothed squirrels, too!
There were never any such things here, Rusty – er, I think…
NEWSFLASH!
A speed camera in Switzerland twice caught something zooming through a 30km-per-hour zone at 52km/h – seven years apart. When they checked the photos, it wasn’t a car but a duck –probably the same one!
NEWSFLASH!
Florida has a capybara café, where the gentle rodents sit in customers’ laps, get fed corn and enjoy strokes and scratches!
NEWSFLASH!
A bird lover called Norman Smith has single-handedly rescued and relocated over 900 snowy owls from Boston Airport since he first removed one from the runway in 1981!
CAN WE UNDERSTAND ANIMALS?
Could we chat with elephants, or find out what a whale’s really saying one day, just like Charlie? Scientists using clever AI (artificial intelligence) technology are getting closer to unlocking animal languages. It can help identify the special names elephants call each other and decode the click-sounds whales use to ‘talk’ across the oceans. It’s even helping us understand how moths hear plants making tiny distress calls (too high for human ears) when they’re unwell, most likely so they can lay their eggs on healthier ones.
Instead of just guessing what animal sounds might
mean, scientists can study loads of recordings using AI and spot patterns we’d totally miss. What if some of these sounds turn out to be full-on languages? And should we try to talk back…?
I bet our cat Luke Skywhisker will just be saying “Feed me” and “No!”
NEWSFLASH!
Beavers are nature’s fire brigade! Their ponds and canals provide so much water to forestlands that they make many plants fireproof, helping to stop wildfires from spreading.
REWILDING (MY WONDERFUL COUNTRY) SCOTLAND!
The Affric Highlands, the UK’s biggest rewilding area, has just launched as a charity. Over the next 30 years, it’ll help restore huge areas of the Central Highlands – from Loch Ness to the west coast.
The plan is to bring back native woodlands, healthy peat bogs and riverside forests, so nature can breathe again. That’s great for golden eagles, red squirrels, ospreys, otters, mountain hares and other wildlife – maybe we’ll even see the return of the Scottish wildcat!
When I’m prime minister, there’ll be a rewilding project in every glen, valley and bog across the land!
Yikes, Rhona’s going into her election speech! Good job it’s time for my page… Turn over fast, Rusty fans!
TWINKLY POO CLUES!
Hi, Rusty fans!
Water voles are Britain’s biggest voles. I love them ’cos they’re like me: cute, clumsy swimmers who need to eat about 80% of their own body weight each day. (For them, that’s grass, twigs, bulbs and other voley stuff. For me, it’s human foods –
especially my annoying sister Rhona’s biscuits.)
I often hear them plopping in the water when we walk by the river. I don’t mean they’re pooing in it. I mean they leap in because they think we’re predators.
But here’s the sad bit: we’ve lost around 90% of water voles in the last 50 years. Now there’s a brilliant new plan to help them in Wales – which is about them pooing.
Conservationists want to track their movements without disturbing them. So, they’re feeding them snacks covered in edible glitter!
Regular glitter is bad for the environment. I know because our Uncle Angus gave Rhona a birthday card with a speck of glitter on and she gave him a three-hour lecture about it. But this cake-sprinkle kind should be fine. They even checked with vets to be sure.
The glitter shows up in their poo – so the team can track where the voles have been! Different colour glitter will mark different families, to see how far they roam. And it’s working. Just 24 hours after feeding, the first sparkly poo was spotted!
Rusty
I was very grateful for Uncle Angus’s card, Rusty, and I only had a little word with him for ONE hour! It’s glitter-ally amazing!
Monthly Project Light Up Your World
Ready to light up your world – just like some deep-sea creatures do? Let’s create a colourful lava lamp that glows like a jellyfish! You’ll use glowing liquid and a clever chemical trick to mimic the light shows happening in the ocean’s darkest depths.
You will need:
y Clear container
y Water or tonic water
y Vegetable oil
y A yellow, pink or orange highlighter
y A straw
y A torch
y Sticky tape
y Blue and purple markers or UV torch (optional)
Set-by-step instructions
1. Pour a few centimetres of normal or tonic water into your container. Place your highlighter tip into the water and swish it around in the water to fill it with ink.
2. Add a layer of vegetable oil until your container is about two-thirds full. Oil is lighter than water, so it floats on top.
3. Don’t have a UV torch? Make your own!
– Put a layer of sticky tape over the glass that covers the torch bulb.
– Colour it with a blue marker.
– Add another layer of tape and colour that blue, too.
– Finally, add another layer, this time coloured with a purple marker.
Ta-da! You’ve built a UV torch.
4. Take your jar, straw and UV torch to a dark room. Point the torch at the oil layer. Put the straw into the water layer and blow (don’t suck!) gently. Bubbles of your highlighterdyed water should float through the oil. What do they look like?
What's the science?
Both tonic water and highlighter ink are fluorescent. That means that when we shine invisible-to-us ultraviolet (UV) light on them, they give off visible light –making our blobs of water appear to glow!
It’s not quite the same as bioluminescence, which deep-sea creatures use to light up their world – but it’s a fun way to explore how glowing in the dark can work. Just like jellyfish and lanternfish, we’re creating light where there usually isn’t any!
By Elizabeth Thomsen
DEEP-SEA ADAPTATIONS
Hello, Eco Kids! By now, you know that life under the sea isn’t a breeze. It’s cold, it’s dark and it’s dangerous! But no fear – the creatures who call the deep sea their home have brilliant skills and qualities to help them survive and thrive!
Don’t you LOVE exploring the sea? All its mysteries, its secrets and hidden treasures, plus the amazing underwater life crawling across the ocean floor and swimming in the deepest of its depths, no matter the doomy darkness, no matter the freezing cold, no matter the crushing pressure! These courageous creatures are not about the easy life – they like to live on the edge of EXTREMES.
Some of them have truly jaw-dropping skills, others have extra body parts
and some even have superhero powers to protect themselves from hungry predators. Let’s dive into a few of their coolest tricks…
BRILLIANT BIOLUMINESCENCE
Imagine never being scared of the dark! That sure is the case when you’ve got a BUILT-IN NIGHTLIGHT!
Deep-sea dwellers sometimes face a whole life in the darkness, the sun’s rays never quite reaching them kilometres under water. So, they’ve come up with a very helpful solution: they make the light themselves! Thanks to special chemical reactions within their bodies, they can produce light to do so many important things, like distract predators or even go on hunting trips of their own.
Can you spot the ostracods? They're the teeny, round ones wearing tiny shells – like peas in armour!
BACK OFF!
Meet tiny sea-dwellers with a glowing secret: ostracods. These small creatures may look unremarkable, but when gulped down, they unleash a dazzling burst of light as a defence mechanism. This makes the predator glow, too – a risky thing in the deep sea! So, the unfortunate fish ends up spitting the ostracod out. A glowin-the-dark spit wad!
In my last investigation, we met the vampire deer. This time, let me introduce you to the vampire squid! It’s got piercing blue eyes – the BIGGEST of any animal on our planet in proportion to its body – and webbed tentacles that look a lot like a red cape. Very vampirish, eh?
Most squids living in shallow waters squirt black ink to escape predators. But
in the pitch-black deep sea, black ink wouldn’t be much help – you wouldn’t even see it! So, this smart squid came up with a better idea: it blasts out glowing blue light instead! But that’s not all…
SLOOOOW DOWN
The vampire squid is totally chill. It barely moves, just drifting along in the ocean currents. But don’t be fooled – it’s not just slow, it’s smart. Moving slowly helps it save energy in the deep sea, where there is barely any oxygen to breathe. Many deep-sea creatures, like the anglerfish and even the Greenland shark, have slow metabolisms, too.
Vampire squid
Greenland shark
GOTCHA!
Speaking of the anglerfish, did you know it also has bioluminescence? Just look at that little unicorn horn shining bright in the dark! But this creepy creature doesn’t use it for protection, like the vampire squid does. It uses it to LURE poor prey straight to it – and CHOMP! Down the hatch it goes. And if the meal’s a bit too big for this creepy chomper? No worries! It’s got an EXPANDABLE STOMACH that can hold fish TWICE the anglerfish’s size! This is a brilliant adaptation for a place where food can be so hard to find.
Another creature that isn’t afraid to swim with the big fish is the gulper eel. It’s got some extra help, too, when catching its prey: an EXPANDABLE MOUTH that blows up like a soap bubble. Then POP! When lunch has been secured, it goes back to its usual, slivery self.
CAN’T SEE, CAN SENSE
Expandable stomachs, expandable mouths… And there’s more! In the deep, dark sea, some creatures can’t rely on sight, so they’ve developed amazing body parts to help them sense the world around them. The goblin shark has an elongated snout called a rostrum. It can detect underwater movement (and the shark’s next snack) thanks to special sensory organs called ampullae of lorenzini.
Then there’s the threadfin snailfish, with its cute fish whiskers called barbels. These feelers help it sense movement and taste what’s nearby! Barbels are full of taste receptors that can tell whether something is food or DANGER.
They say slow and steady wins the race, and the snailfish sure is a RECORD BREAKER! It’s the deepest-swimming fish ever recorded, at over 8,000 metres underwater. That’s a place where the pressure is 800 times stronger than at sea level – swimming this low would feel like having 100 elephants stacked on your head!
So, how do they survive the crushing pressure? It’s all thanks to their squishiness! Their flesh is pretty much like jelly, which helps them glide through the depths. Even their bones are soft and flexible, so they compress under pressure without cracking!
Other fish have their own adaptations to keep calm under pressure. The Cuvier’s beaked whale, for example, has COLLAPSIBLE lungs – and it can hold its breath for an unbelievable 222 minutes!
SLIME TIME
Hagfish can’t glow in the dark, and they don’t have weird body parts – but do you know what they do have? Lots and lots of SLIME. When they sense danger approaching, they ooze out a sticky mix of sugars and proteins along their bodies. It clogs up a predator’s mouth and gills – yuck! No one wants to mess with that. This slippery defence helps hagfish stay safe, and some can live up to a whopping 40 years happily under the sea.
Isn’t it incredible how, over millions of years of evolution, these underwater creatures have developed such wonderful (and sometimes weird) ways to survive the most dangerous of depths? This makes me wonder: if you called the deep sea your home, what amazing abilities would you want to have?
Vocabulary
Defence mechanism: A way for living things to protect themselves. Elongated: Stretched out very long. Expandable: Can become bigger and larger. Metabolism: How a body takes food and turns it into energy to do things.
The deeper the sea, the deeper the weirdness gets. I’ll prove it!
WHEN IS A BLOBFISH NOT A BLOBFISH?
Earlier this year, blobfish were crowned New Zealand’s Fish of the Year. Once you’ve seen one, you never forget its looks. Squishy. Droopy. Like melting ice cream in a bad mood.
But here’s where things get deeply weird – I heard they don’t really look like that at all!
Turns out it’s true. They live at depths of 600-1,200 metres off the coasts of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand, where they look like regular fish! It’s the crushing water pressure in those icy cold depths and their loose skin that keeps their soft-boned bodies together. They look more like giant tadpoles down there!
It’s only when they’re yanked up quickly to the surface, where there’s much less pressure, that they flop into blobs.
CASE CLOSED!
Fun Fact
Many deep-sea fish are filled with a jellylike substance that stops them from exploding inwards under the pressure!
So, do all those weird-looking deep-sea creatures look less strange in their own habitat? No way!
Just look at the dumbo octopus, named after Disney’s flying elephant. Those floppy elephant ‘ears’ are really two large sticky-out fins. Unlike any other octopus, they propel themselves through the water by fin-flapping, using their webbed arms to steer!
QUICK QUIZ
How many hearts does an octopus have, how many brains, and what colour is their blood?
And get a load of this black swallower fish’s stretchy stomach. It expands like a balloon so it can gulp down fish twice its size!
Fun Fact
Their tummies stretch so much they turn see-through!
Now meet my new top underwater oddballs: sea cucumbers. Some dwell on deep seabeds and others hang out in shallows. They come in all shapes and sizes – from short and stubby to as long as an adult human.
Bright yellow gummy squirrel sea cucumbers have a tail-like body part that sticks up like a squirrel’s tail! It may help them hitch rides on deep ocean currents.
Fun Fact
Gummy squirrel cucumbers also have a bright red underbelly with 18 short tentacles for scooping up seafloor snacks!
Pineapple sea cucumbers look like a pineapple mixed with a monster sausage. They crawl along the seabed eating dead particles and pooing out clean sand. Beware those bums: these cucumbers can also squirt out their internal organs to put off predators! (They grow back over time.)
And how about sea pigs? These sea cucumbers are so-named because they’re pink-ish and pig-shaped, and because of how they move along the muddy seabed. They live in the deep ocean, up to 5,000 metres down. That’s where they get about on special limbs called tube feet, like many other sea cucumbers.
Sea cucumbers, you’ve won the much-coveted Simon Undersea Weirdness Award!
Three hearts, nine brains (including a mini one in each arm) and blue blood!
Somewhere as dark and strange as the deep sea is bound to hide secrets. Luckily, you’ve got a world-class weirdness detective (me!) on the case.
CASE FILE: TWANGS FROM THE TRENCH!
The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the ocean – a monster crack in the ocean floor reaching 10,935 metres down. That’s so deep that if you dropped Mount Everest in, it would disappear well beneath the waves.
In 2014, scientists sent robotic gliders into the trench with sound-recording gear. You know what noises they heard bouncing around? Not what they were expecting! This was seriously spooky.
First came a deep, rumbling growl. Then a series of high-pitched metallic pings, clangs and rings. This ‘biotwang’ sound ringing through the water reminded them of starship sounds from sci-fi like Star Wars and Star Trek. Well, some folk do think aliens have underwater bases here!
An underwater starship?
Was it an alien craft, buried in the depths? Or a deep-sea monster we’ve never seen? The scientists were stumped.
It took until last year for them to finally crack the case. The ‘spaceship noises’ were almost certainly calls from Bryde’s whales – gentle giants most likely trying to find each other.
AI (artificial intelligence) sped through 200,000 hours of recordings to make the connection!
Let’s go back in the trench and spook some more scientists!
CASE CLOSED!
Fun Fact
Scientists aren’t quite sure where the water that covers nearly two thirds of our planet’s surface actually came from. Well, I didn’t leave a tap running, honest!
MANY-ARMED MONSTER MYTH
As you know, I’ve got a soft spot for cryptids, those mysterious animals some people swear to have seen, even when science says, “Hmm, not so sure.” And nothing’s better than when one turns out to be real.
Enter the kraken. This legendary giant octopus-like sea monster was said to lurk in the wildest, most remote parts of the sea, where it would grab ships in its twisty grip and drag them into the deep. Aaaargh!
Krakens were almost certainly based on sightings of giant squid and colossal squid, which we now know exist (but they don’t drag down ships!). Colossal squid may be the largest of the two, possibly growing up to 12 metres long – about the length of four cars. They’re also the rarest.
Fun Fact
Colossal squid have the largest eyes of any animal in the world! Ideal for seeing their prey and their predators –including their number-one enemies, sperm whales.
They were recently in the news when one was captured on video in its natural habitat for the first time ever. Normally, we only ever encounter dead or dying ones. This healthy one was filmed by a robot camera at about 600 metres deep.
It was about 0.3 metres long. Not so colossal – but it was a kid squid!
Even below the bottom of the sea is weird. Scientists discovered evidence of a previously unknown seafloor that may have sunk deep into our planet’s insides about 250 million years ago!
6. Legendary sea monster based on a real-life colossal creature (6)
8. Deep-sea shark with a long snout to sense its next snack (6,5)
9. This creepy creature dangles a glowing lure to trap its prey (10)
11. Deep-sea fish with glowing spots that act like fairy lights (11)
12. An octopus with earlike fins that flaps through the water (5)
Down:
1. Lives on whale bones and has no mouth or stomach (10)
2. The world’s deepest-swimming fish, soft and squishy like jelly (9)
4. A pinkish deep-sea cucumber that trots along the muddy seabed (6)
6. Legendary sea monster based on a real-life colossal creature (6)
5. A fish that looks like melting ice cream – but only at the surface (8)
1. Lives on whale bones and has no mouth or stomach (10)
7. Tiny crustacean that lights up a predator’s tummy when eaten (8)
8. Deep-sea shark with a long snout to sense its next snack (6,5)
3. Escapes predators by oozing oodles of slime (7)
9. This creepy creature dangles a glowing lure to trap its prey (10)
10. Giant ones battle whales; some even shoot out glowing ink! (5)
11. Deep-sea fish with glowing spots that act like fairy lights (11)
True or False
12. An octopus with ear-like fins that flaps through the water (5)
2. The world's deepest-swimming fish, soft and squishy like jelly (9)
3. Escapes predators by oozing buckets of slime (7)
4. A pinkish deep-sea cucumber that trots along the muddy seabed (6)
5. A fish that looks like melting ice cream… but only at the surface (8)
Can you tell which of these deep-sea facts are true – and which are totally made up? Circle T for True or F for FALSE for each one below.
1 All life on Earth needs sunlight.
7. Tiny crustacean that lights up a predator's tummy when eaten (8)
10. Giant ones battle whales; some even shoot out glowing ink! (5)
2 More people have been to the deep sea than to outer space.
3 The vampire squid sprays black ink to confuse predators.
4 The Mariana Trench is so deep it could hide Mount Everest.
Spot 10 Differences
Match the Shadow
Find the picture that matches the large shadow shape in the centre.
It’s June! Isn’t it time she took down her Christmas light?
Over to You
We received so many fantastic entries to our Time-Travelling Animal Adventure competition – thank you to everyone who took part! We loved seeing your creative ideas, colourful drawings and exciting stories. From racing dinosaurs to rescuing baby pterodactyls, your time-travel tales truly brought the past to life. It was a tough decision, but here are our four winning entries... Congrats to our four winners!
Luca, age 6, Waterlooville
The Vegavis iaai
Ada, age 8, Riccall
Interview with Mr Dilo the Dilophosaurus
1. False – Some deep-sea life survives without sunlight.
2. False – Fewer people have visited the deep sea than space.
3. False – It sprays glowing light, not black ink.
4. True – It’s deep enough to hide Mount Everest.
Underwater Superpower Mix-Up
Can you match each strange superpower to the deep-sea creature that has it?
The deep sea is full of weird and wonderful creatures – each with their own survival trick. Below are seven real deep-sea animals and seven amazing abilities. But who does what?
One of the powers is used by TWO creatures – can you spot which?
Creatures
�� Superpowers
�� Glows in the dark to distract predators
�� Explodes in a flash of light when eaten
�� Uses red colouring to hide in the dark
�� Can stretch its stomach to swallow huge prey
�� Squirts slime to block attackers’ mouths
�� Shoots out glowing blue ink
�� Has a mouth that
a soap bubble
Questions
Sea Monster Story Time
For this month’s competition, we want you to dive into your imagination and write a short story (150–200 words) about a mysterious sea creature. Maybe it’s a tentacled beast that guards a sunken ship... Or a misunderstood sea monster who just wants a friend.
Will your creature be spooky, silly or secretly heroic? It’s up to you!
Let your deep-sea story unfold in the darkest depths of the ocean. Bonus points for including strange sounds, glowing lights or an unexpected twist!
Four lucky readers will win a brilliant new book by one of our very own writers!
Earth’s New Animals
by Christine Modafferi, illustrated by Harriet Hobday
Meet some of the newest creatures on the planet! Scientists discover up to a thousand new animals every year – and this book introduces 120 of them, from rainbow-coloured wrasse to mini chameleons and mysterious new whales.
Discover how they were found, where they live and what makes them so special. Some are tiny, some are strange, and all are real!
Beautifully illustrated and full of fascinating facts, this book is perfect for curious young explorers who love animals and our wild, wonderful world.
4 TO WIN!
Christine is one of our Eco Kids Planet writers, and we’re thrilled to feature her brilliant new book as this month’s prize.
RRP: £14.99
Published by Hodder Children’s Books
Available from Amazon and other bookshops
How to enter the competition: Email your story to win@ecokidsplanet.co.uk before 10th July 2025. Don’t forget to include your full name, age and address, so we know how to reach you.
