Written by: Bai Xiaobai, Editor: Xu Dewen
Facing the sea, spring blossoms, human fascination with the ocean is a special feeling, sometimes difficult to understand. How many unknown beings exist on the ocean floor besides the marine life we already know? SpongeBob SquarePants and Pyrrhus? sea monster? Recently, a mysterious and rare giant "sea monster" was discovered in the waters near New Zealand.
Divers Steve Hathaway and Andrew Buttle were diving near a volcanic island in northeast New Zealand when they dived to a depth of about 10 meters when they suddenly spotted a milky white creature up to 8 meters long swimming around them. The divers did not dare to act rashly, and quietly followed the milky white giant creature, which slowly moved about 200 meters in the sea, changing with the current, taking on a strange shape.
Are there really sea monsters in the world? Divers took the video and brought it back to scientists to study, and Andrew Jeffs, a professor of oceanography at the University of Auckland, said it wasn't some mysterious sea monster, but a rare swarm of marine animals. This animal is called fire body worm, and cutely called "sea kimchi", which is a kind of scaled sea squirt (pyrosomes).
Fireworms prefer to inhabit warm waters, so most of them are found in the upper layers of the ocean, but they are occasionally found in the deep sea. Fireworm populations generally consist of hundreds to thousands of individuals, cylindrical or conical groups, ranging from as short as one centimeter to several meters long.
The fire worms are only a few millimeters in size, and they are embedded in a gelatinous coat together. Each fireworm opens to the inside and outside of the "tube" group, sucking seawater from the outside, filtering the phytoplankton through the internal filter, the gill cage, and transporting the filtered water into a cylinder inside the group.
The outside of the fire body insect swarm is bumpy and rugged, and each "bump" represents a single individual, and then one by one they are connected together to form a smooth and smooth whole, which is completely invisible and composed of many individuals, which is breathtaking. They absorb water in a neat and uniform manner, and then spray it backwards, working seamlessly together, and the resulting water flow pushes them slowly forward and forages everywhere. Fire bugs prefer to swim to sea level at night to filter out phytoplankton, and then return to the deep sea just before dawn to avoid becoming predators of delicious meals.
Moira Dima, an ecologist at the National Institute of Water Quality and Atmosphere research in Wellington, said that the fireworm population has built several meters of white "sea monsters" through a combination of sexual and asexual reproduction, and their growth rate is extremely fast, but how fast it is still difficult to determine.
This is not the first time that a large population of Pyroterats has been found in New Zealand, and in 2017, a large population of Pyranium worms also appeared on the Pacific coast of the United States, which is extremely large beyond the normal range, causing concern among fishermen, because the appearance of these Pyrosomes makes it difficult for them to catch fish and shrimp.
Why did the fire insect swarm become so huge? The researchers believe it may be related to the unusual warmth of the seawater. Scientists worry that if a large number of Pyras die en masse, it will create a huge death zone, because decomposing their bodies will suck up a lot of oxygen from nearby seas, posing a serious threat to other marine life.
Perhaps it is the wanton behavior of human beings that nature can't look down, and the emergence of these strange and huge fire insect swarms is a warning to us that every slight increase in ocean temperature may bring about huge changes.
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