Researchers Discover What Vampire Squids Eat:

 This frame grab from an underwater video shows a vampire
  squid in a typical feeding position, drifting horizontally in
  the deep sea with one of its filaments extended.
(Credit: © 2011 MBARI) 

 

About 100 years ago, marine biologists hauled the first vampire squid up from the depths of the sea. Since that time, perhaps a dozen scientific papers have been published on this mysterious animal, but no one has been able to figure out exactly what it eats. Generally, the vampire squid may sound as a nightmarish predator.

A new paper by MBARI Postdoctoral Fellow Henk-Jan Hoving and Senior Scientist Bruce Robison shows for the first time that, the vampire squid uses two thread-like filaments to capture bits of organic debris that sink down from the ocean surface into the deep sea.

In a recent article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Hoving and Robison show that vampire squids eat mostly "marine snow" -- a mixture of dead bodies, poop, and snot. The dead bodies are the remains of microscopic algae and animals that live in the waters farther up in the ocean, but sink down into the depths after they die.  Hoving and Robison's research shows that the vampire squid is a "detritivore" rather than an active predator.


In addition to looking at the stomach-contents of vampire squids from museum collections, the researchers used MBARI's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to collect live vampire squids and study their feeding habits in the laboratory. 

Their bodies are neutrally buoyant, so they don't have to expend energy to stay at a particular depth. Even better, they don't have to swim to find food, but simply extend their filaments to collect food that drifts past them.

Finally, vampire squids don't have to expend much energy avoiding predators, because they live at depths where there is so little oxygen that few other animals can survive. Conveniently, these deep, low-oxygen zones are often found where there is an abundance of life near the sea surface, which in turn creates lots of marine snow for vampire squids to eat. 


Vampire Squid is a small deep- sea species ,and its inhabits the deep water of all the world's ocean basins where there is almost no oxygen. . The vampire squid is a soft-bodied, passive creature, about the size, shape, and color of a football.Its maximum total  length is nearly 30 cm. It has a cloak-like web that stretches between its eight arms. When threatened, it turns inside out. They have white beak-like jaws. The animal "fly" through the water by flapping their fins. 

The vampire squid is almost fully covered in  photophores (light-producing organs), which appear as small, white discs but are larger and more complex at the tips of the arms and at the base of the two fins. However, they are absent from the undersides of the caped arms. It  knows how to control  the organs, and is also able to producing disorienting flashes of light for fractions of a sec to few minutes in duration.




Sources: ScienceDaily
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here is the url : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120926133239.htm