40 Fun Facts About Vampire Squid

Instead of blood, what sinking deep-sea material makes up most of a vampire squid's diet?

Marine snow is a drizzle of dead plankton, droppings and slime from the waters above. No other living cephalopod is known to rely on it instead of catching live prey.

Despite the squid in its name, which animals are the vampire squid's closest living relatives?

Octopuses are its nearest kin, though the vampire squid is the only living member of an order of its own.

Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid's scientific name, translates as a vampire squid from where?

Hell it is: infernalis is Latin for "of hell", a fierce label for a gentle drifter about a foot long.

Measured against the size of its body, which feature of the vampire squid is the largest in the animal kingdom?

Eyes an inch across sit on a six-inch animal, about what a full-grown dog has, the better to catch faint glimmers in the dark.

Which Wall Street bank did journalist Matt Taibbi brand a vampire squid in a 2009 magazine article?

Goldman Sachs got the label in Rolling Stone, in a piece on the firm's part in the 2008 financial crisis, and the nickname stuck.

With no ink sac to rely on, what does a badly frightened vampire squid squirt at an attacker instead?

Luminous mucus full of blue sparks can shine for nearly ten minutes, long enough for the animal to vanish into the dark.

Which fruit names the defensive posture in which a vampire squid folds its webbed arms back over its body?

Pineapple posture turns the dark web inside out, hiding the body and showing rows of harmless fleshy spines.

Californian researchers describe the vampire squid as about the size, shape and color of which sports item?

A football, the American kind, is a fair match for the soft, dark red body, which reaches about a foot long.

Which nickname do biologists give the vampire squid as the last survivor of an ancient order of cephalopods?

Living fossil fits because every other member of its order is extinct and known only from ancient rocks.

Most squid breed once and then die; what did a 2015 study find that female vampire squid do instead?

Spawn many times is the finding: more than twenty rounds in a lifetime, with a rest between them, a pattern more usual in fish.

Which gas is so scarce in the vampire squid's home layer of the ocean that few predators can follow it there?

Oxygen can fall to about 3% of saturation there, and the vampire squid is the only cephalopod able to spend its whole life in that layer.

Which zoologist led the 1898–99 deep-sea expedition that caught the first vampire squid, then named the animal?

Carl Chun published the first description in 1903, and at first filed the animal in the wrong group of cephalopods.

Which country sent out the steamship Valdivia, whose deep-sea nets hauled up the first vampire squid?

Germany's Valdivia left Hamburg in 1898 and covered about 32,000 nautical miles, around Africa and down to the Antarctic ice.

Hemocyanin, the pigment that turns a vampire squid's blood blue, is built around which metal?

Copper does the job that iron does in human blood, and the vampire squid's pigment works more efficiently than that of other cephalopods.

What name do biologists give the soft, finger-like spines that line each arm of a vampire squid?

Cirri look fearsome when the web is turned inside out, but they are soft and help pass food along to the mouth.

What are the light-producing organs that dot almost the whole body of a vampire squid called?

Photophores can flash for a fraction of a second or shine for minutes, and the animal can vary how bright and how big they look.

The dark web of skin between a vampire squid's arms helped earn its name by resembling which garment?

A cloak like a vampire's, not any taste for blood, is said to have inspired the name.

Vampire squid have lost the muscles that work their pigment cells, costing them which typical squid talent?

Rapid color change would be wasted in permanent darkness, so the pigment cells remain but can no longer flash new patterns.

Which glowing body parts does a threatened vampire squid bunch high above its head to draw a bite away?

Arm tips make a cheap decoy, because they grow back if a predator bites them off.

Which California attraction became the first place in the world to put a live vampire squid on public display?

Monterey Bay Aquarium showed one in May 2014, in a cephalopod exhibition mounted with its sister research institute.

How do very young vampire squid mainly push themselves through the water, a method that adults largely give up?

Jet propulsion suits a tiny body, but a slow flapping stroke costs less energy once the animal grows, so adults switch.

Newly hatched vampire squid, about 8 mm long, differ from the dark adults in having bodies of what appearance?

Transparent hatchlings have no dark pigment yet, and their short arms have no web between them.

Before they begin to feed for themselves, newly hatched vampire squid survive on an internal supply of what?

Yolk carries the hatchling for a stretch nobody has yet measured, one of many gaps in what is known of its early life.

Of all deep-sea cephalopods, the vampire squid is recorded as having the lowest what, relative to its mass?

Metabolic rate that low lets it idle on scraps in water where most animals would suffocate.

The vampire squid's well-developed statocysts keep the weak-muscled animal agile by giving it which sense?

Balance organs called statocysts let it twist and turn nimbly despite a soft, feeble body.

Scientists who filmed feeding vampire squid liken the long sticky filament each one trails to what?

A fishing line is apt: the filament can stretch to eight body lengths, and the animal reels it in to scrape off whatever has stuck.

By eating sinking debris, scavengers like the vampire squid help carry which element to the deep seafloor?

Carbon carried to the bottom this way helps keep the ocean healthy and cushions the world against climate change.

A vampire squid carries which gripping structures only on the outer half of each of its arms?

Suckers stop halfway along, and the inner half of each arm carries only soft, finger-like spines.

An ancient Montana relative of the vampire squid, billed as the oldest of its group, honors which US president?

Joe Biden is honored in Syllipsimopodi bideni, a ten-armed animal about 330 million years old, though some experts dispute where it belongs on the family tree.

Vampyronassa, an extinct cousin of the vampire squid dug up in France, lived in which geological period?

Jurassic seas held Vampyronassa about 165 million years ago, and its arms suggest an active hunter, unlike its drifting modern cousin.

Which large rattail fish of the North Pacific counts the vampire squid among its main prey?

Giant grenadier can top two meters, and they are among the most abundant fish at the dim depths where their prey drifts.

Most of what is known about vampire squid behavior comes from brief meetings with which deep-sea machines?

Underwater robots called ROVs film the animals where they live, since ones hauled up in nets tend to arrive injured.

Which children's cartoon about a crew of undersea explorers devoted an episode to an injured vampire squid?

The Octonauts sends its medic, Peso, on a solo dive into the Midnight Zone, where he meets a hurt vampire squid and ends up helping it.

Two white patches on top of a vampire squid's head, once taken for glowing organs, turned out to do what?

Detect light, not make it: the patches are photoreceptors, the reverse of what early anatomists assumed.

Early scientists split the vampire squid into several species, misled by which changing body parts?

Fins come as one pair at hatching, then two pairs, then one again, and each stage was once named as a different animal.

The vampire squid keeps a thin internal remnant of a shell, shared with true squid, known by which name?

Gladius shapes in the vampire squid and certain extinct cephalopods are alike enough to point to a close relationship.

Which British expedition of the 1870s inspired the vampire squid's discoverer to mount his own deep-sea voyage?

Challenger made deep-sea science famous in the 1870s, and two decades later he persuaded his own government to pay for a rival voyage.

Because vampire squid eat sinking ocean debris, they are thought to face a raised risk from which pollutant?

Microplastics end up among the drifting particles the animal gathers for a living, so its diet puts it in harm's way.

Live vampire squid appear in Ocean Deep, an episode of which BBC nature series narrated by David Attenborough?

Planet Earth ran to eleven episodes, each on a different habitat, and the deep sea was given one all to itself.

Compared with adult vampire squid, where in the ocean do the smallest young animals tend to be found?

Deeper water holds the smallest animals, which suggests that the species breeds far below where the adults drift.