npr: Hold on to your hats: A sea cucumber that looks like a headless chicken has been caught on vide

npr:

Hold on to your hats: A sea cucumber that looks like a headless chicken has been caught on video in the deep seas near East Antarctica.

It’s a surprising location for the species, Enypniastes eximia, to turn up. The last place it was filmed was thousands of miles away in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

Researchers from Australia’s Department of the Environment and Energy noticed the animal while using new deep-sea camera technology that they say was developed with the commercial longline fishing industry to help with fisheries management. The idea is to find vulnerable ecosystems to prevent the fishing industry from doing damage.

“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,” Australian Antarctic Division Program Leader Dirk Welsford said in a statement. “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.”

He describes the moment the poultry-like sea creature came into their view. “We’ve got hours and hours of footage of not much really, and then one of our technicians was sitting there watching this footage and the chicken monster floated past,” Welsford told Australia’s ABC.

Behold The Headless Chicken Of The Deep Sea

Photo: NOAA
Caption: A sea cucumber that looks like a headless chicken has been caught on video in the deep seas near East Antarctica, thousands of miles from where one of the species was last spotted.

Whoa!-Patrick