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Today’s special animal friend is the vampire squid from hell, Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Nah, biologists aren’t trying to be funny or anything. This small cephalopod occupies its own order, Vampyromorphida, making it, technically, neither a squid nor an octopus, but its own thing. This animal grows about one foot long. It occupies a deep sea habitat at 2,000 feet of depth or more in tropical and subtropical oceans. It has sticky arms that allow it to trap and eat micro-organisms and small bits of oceanic debris.

This part of the ocean is called the “aphotic” (no light) level and the Oxygen Minimum Zone or OMZ, where oxygen saturation is about 3%. (The oxygen level near the ocean’s surface is about 36%.) The vampire squid is the only animal known to live and breathe its entire life cycle with this low level of oxygen. To survive in this environment, they have gills with an unusually large surface area. Their blood’s hemocyanin (basically copper-based red blood cells, only they’re blue) binds and transports oxygen with unusual efficiency. Finally, they have an extraordinarily low metabolic rate for their size.

Living in OMZ protects the vampire squid from most predators, which rely on higher oxygen levels. A few large fish and whales are “diving predators,” which enter the OMZ to feed but do not need to breathe there. Vampire squid drift along the deep ocean currents, trailing two long, retractile filaments. These are very sensitive, and when they contact something in the water, the animal investigates it by touch. If a threat is sensed, the animal turns itself inside out, exposing spiny projections on the inside of its arms and the cape which connects the arms. (The cape, especially in specimens that are black in color, is the source of the “vampire squid” name.) If this does not deter the threat, it may eject a cloud of bioluminescent mucus that interferes with the predator’s perception, allowing the squid to “disappear.” This mucus also clings to the predator, making it more vulnerable to something else that wants to eat it.

There’s more, but now we’ll talk about its reproduction. (Because it is so difficult to observe deep-sea animals, some of the following information is speculative, based on what is known about other cephalopods in this environment.) Because of the dearth of nutrients in this environment and their very low metabolism, reproduction is slow. It is believed these animals rarely encounter one another, but if an adult male and female come in contact, perhaps attracted to one another by their bioluminescence, the male will hydraulically implant a spermatophore, which the female will store within her mantle.

After a time, times, and half a time, the female will lay an egg or two. Scientists believe these animals breed multiple times in their lifespan. The developing embryos are nourished by yolk, the production of which takes a huge amount of nutrition for the female. It is reported that she may guard the egg(s) for up to 400 days before tiny, close replicas of the adult hatch. As the hatchlings sloooowly grow, they develop small fins on their heads which they will eventually use for movement; in infancy, they move by jet propulsion. The young squid live at even deeper levels in the ocean than the adults.

Vampire squid are a species of Least Concern, on the assumption that their population is what it always was and nothing much is changing in their environment. The possibility that they have civilization is too weird for even me to contemplate.