(Photo : Nick Hobgood/Wikimedia Commons)
The animal world is filled with bizarre things, and recently, one of them popped up on the ocean floor. Scientists in California has stumbled upon a googly-eyed squid that looks like it's "fake" but is, in fact, very real.
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In a video published by Nautilus Live, the team of scientists spotted the adorable creature at 2,950 feet deep off the coast of California.
“It looks so fake. Like some little kid dropped their toy," said one of the researchers in the video,Gizmodo reports.
The perplexing creature turned out to be real and is actually called Rossia pacifica, more commonly known as stubby squid. Nautilus Live notes that Rossia pacifica is commonly found in the Northern Pacific from Japan to Southern California.
Looking like a cross between an octopus and a squid and is closely related to cuttlefish, this cephalopod belongs to the sepiolid family, The Cephalopod Page notes.
The stubby squid sports two long tentacles and eight suckered arms but do not have a quill or cuttlebone just like squids do. They mostly live in the bottom of the ocean and, just like cuttlefish, could bury themselves in the sand.
Stubby squids usually appear at night when they are attracted by bright light from divers, but bury themselves in mud or sand during the day to avoid danger. As a defense mechanism, stubby squids emit a blob of black ink to distract any predator.
These adorable creatures grow as long as six centimeters. They access deeper depths and move around by using their fins to jet propulsion, where they suck in water and then squirt it out to eject their body in different directions.
It has a harsh reproduction process as female stubby squid usually dies after mating. The female eggs lay its eggs (around 25 to 50 eggs per mating) on rocks, sponge, and clam shells, and then die afterwards. The eggs are enclosed in a durable capsule that's tough enough to last four to nine months for hatching.
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