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Endless ocean wiki oceana1/9/2023 Vampire squid have black chromatophores interspersed with reddish-brown ones, which determine their coloration. Adults have two fins near the top of the mantle (main body section). Beaks, located in the center of the circle of arms, are white. ![]() These two arms differ in structure and composition from the other eight and are believed to be a uniquely derived trait of this species. A fifth pair of filamentous arms extend well past the total length of the body, and can retract into pockets in the webbing. Suckers are located on the distal (lower) half of the arms. Cloak-like webbing stretches between eight main arms, the insides of which are covered with fleshy spikes (cirri). They have large blue or red eyes (depending on light conditions), proportionally the largest eye-to-body ratio of any animal in the world. But in reality, it’s a soft-bodied, passive creature about the size of a football. It’s easy to imagine the vampire squid as a thing of nightmares, lurking in the deep sea. ![]() They are a phylogenetic relict, the first group to evolutionarily diverge from octopuses, possessing features of both octopuses and decapodiformes (squid, cuttlefishes, etc.). In 1925, on a survey expedition near Panama for the New York Zoological Society, William Beebe’s crew hauled in “a very small but very terrible octopus, black as night, with ivory white jaws and blood-red eyes." It was Vampyroteuthis infernalis, literally “the vampire squid from Hell” – first described in 1903 by Carl Chun, a German teuthologist (someone who studies cephalopods) who identified it as an octopus, because it had eight arms, or so he thought… Vampire squids are the only members of their order, Vampyromorphida. The Lore & Legend of Texas Saltwater Fishing.
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