In a scene from a horror movie, gruesome "worms" that almost look like lobsters appear at the bottom of the ocean to attack crocodile carcasses, using their jaws to break through the scaly skin and feed on the succulent insides. The bodies of "KDSPEs" and "KDSPs" lie a mile and a quarter (2 kilometers) off the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, while football-sized isopods - which are related to lollipop or pill bugs - had a field day. Craig McLean and Clifton Nunnally, researchers at the University of Louisiana Marine Society, said the isopods could last months or years between meals. McLean says in the video, "They have an amazing ability to gorge themselves, store up energy, and then essentially never eat another meal again for months to years." Colleagues interested in studying how "food balls" affect marine ecosystems. A food ball can be anything from a giant whale carcass to logs (certain clams and special bacteria can digest wood) that are washed into the sea through rivers. Alligator carcasses may be a common food chain, but they have never been studied before, McLean said.
The researchers weighed alligator carcasses donated by the state of Louisiana, which humanely euthanizes the animals in its alligator management program. Then they watched on camera what creatures came to feast.
"The deep sea is a food desert dotted with food oases," Nunnally said in the video. Crocodile carcasses are a particularly interesting oasis, he added, because crocodiles are the closest thing today to ancient marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs. Some of the creatures that feed on modern crocodiles may be the same as those that ate ichthyosaurs millions of years ago,
he said. "Easy work"Isopods are crustaceans that trace their ancestry back 300 million years. The giant isopods that feed on the alligators seem to have adapted well to their role as scavengers. In less than 24 hours, several alligators were dipped in the middle of the crocodile's abdomen and gobbled down from the inside.
"I thought the crocodile skins would be hard to get through, but apparently their biting and squeezing of the jaws made the crocodile skins easy to work with, Nunnally said:
One of the isopods in the video started to swim away and ended up diving straight to the sandy bottom. The animal may have been so well fed that it had trouble moving, the researchers said. [In photos: Spooky deep-sea creatures]
"We've seen in other scavengers that they'll eat so much that they basically become motionless or numb to movement, so it could just be the fact that they're eating too much in order to get this rare resource and, you know, they're actually inhibiting themselves Nannerly said in the video: "By moving appropriately,
"The project also aims to understand how carbon in terrestrial lifeforms reaches the deep sea. The researchers lowered the crocodile carcass nearly two months ago and plan to return to the site later this week. They expect the carcass to be half-dead and other scavengers to move in to get the meat out of reach of the isopods. It's even possible that a bone-eating worm called ossifiedax could be found in the alligator's bones.
"I think it's going to be interesting to see new scavengers popping up," Nunnally said.
Between April 10 and April 24, the researchers will be tweeting their findings at @LUMCONscience, @craigmc, and @searifo, where they use the hashtag #Woodfall.
Photographs: the weirdest-looking fish in photos: deep-sea expedition finds octopus Metropolis Wonders of the Sea: spectacular photographs of marine lifeOriginally published in Live Science. "