Our oceans are an endless cornucopia of weirdness. Today, we’d like to introduce you to a cockeyed deep-sea cephalopod called the strawberry squid. Researchers writing in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B say each of the squid’s unusual eyes serves a separate purpose in the black depths of the sea.
Histioteuthis heteropsis (literally “different eyes”) is pink, studded with bioluminescent spots, and quite content to cruise through the “twilight zone” some 650–3300 feet beneath the surface of the ocean. It has one enormous yellow eye and one normal blue eye—as normal as squid eyes get, anyway.
Biologist Kate Thomas of Duke University, lead author on the paper, says she was impressed by the strawberry squid’s strangeness. “You can’t look at one and not wonder what’s going on with them,” she says in the video above.
So she decided to find out. She…
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