Director Ridley Scott may have just found his next alien.
An extremely deep-dwelling and spooky-looking sea creature was discovered inside a vast trench off South American shores.
This discovery, Dulcibella camanchaca, was made in the pitch black nearly 8,000 meters deep — close to the height of Mount Everest — in the South Pacific Ocean’s Atacama trench near Chile.
“Dulcibella camanchaca is a fast-swimming predator that we named after ‘darkness’ in the languages of the peoples from the Andes region to signify the deep, dark ocean from where it predates,” said researcher Dr. Johanna Weston of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Not far off from a face-hugger in “Alien,” this creature of the deep can use its appendages to latch on to unsuspecting prey. The research team described their anatomy as “highly maneuverable bodies that make them effective at capturing, killing, and feasting.”
Weston added that the white, sci-fi-looking, 4-centimeter-long crustacean is a new species and a never-before-seen genus. It opens the door to further discovery towards the ocean’s bottom half, also called the hadel zone, particularly in the local trench.
The zone was called “an endemic hotspot” by Weston, who is eager to see what else lies in the lurch in the geographically isolated Atacama.
Details of the newly found sea creatures are published in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity. They were part of a larger 2023 initiative to explore extremely low waters.
It involved a mooring system called the Integrated Deep-Ocean Observing System, or IDOOS.
IDOOS used baiting traps and other scientific equipment at a depth just shy of 8,000 feet. After catching a Dulcibella camanchaca, the amphipods were frozen and analyzed at Chile’s Universidad de Concepción.
Co-researcher Dr. Carolina González said the discovery “highlights ongoing biodiversity discoveries in the Atacama Trench.”
“This finding underlines the importance of continued deep-ocean exploration, particularly in Chile’s front yard,” she added.
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