Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb Here. The ocean is mysterious, arguably even more mysterious than space. But unlike space, the ocean is teeming with a stupendous array of living things. We haven't described even a fraction of these organisms, but luckily we are familiar with the vampire squid, the vampire squid Latin name vampera tooth. This infra analis isn't actually a squid, and it definitely isn't a vampire squid from Hell, which
is what that scientific name translates to. It is a cephalopod like octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish, but the vampire squid has a taxonomic order all to itself, and that's because it shares traits with both squids and octopuses, not because it's a blood sucking undead creature of the night. Although it is blood red in color and does have a dark webbing between its arms that looks a little bit like a cape, and where it lives it's always pretty dark.
The ocean, like the atmosphere, has strata. Vampire squid live in the mesopelagic zone of the open ocean, which starts where the sunny productive epipolagic zone of the surface ends. This is down at around six hundred and sixty feet that's two hundred meters where that surface zone gives way to the dim, deep twilight zone of the mesopelagic which extends to around thirteen thousand feet or one thousand meters
below the surface. Like many other mesopelagic animals, vampire squid dyne on bits of dead plant and animal matter that filter down from above. Though these crimson be caped misfits look threatening with their dark, spiny underbellies, they're not hunters and have very few defenses. Their self defense options are to turn themselves into a squishy, black spiny ball, like a particularly dirty pair of socks, or to spray junk
at their enemy. The cephalopods living in shallower water protect themselves with jets of dark ink, but since vampire squid already lived in the dark, they squirt out a colorless, bioluminescent fluid to confuse potential predators. Vampire squid also have little lights at the end of their eight long sectionless arms.
Nobody's completely sure what they're for, but they might use them to communicate with other vampire squid that they meet, and what we do know for certain is that they're not using them to hypnotize anybody and suck their blood probably. Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other mysterious topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com