See the Bizarre Creatures Living in a Deep-Sea Mountain Range

Monsters dwell within the deep ocean—or at the least the inspiration for the monsters we make up. This clip reveals a hyperiid amphipod, the truth behind the fictional, horrifying, extraterrestrial creations of the 1979 transfer Alien. These amphipods take over different creatures’ our bodies for their very own profit. In this case, it’s commandeered one other filter-feeding invertebrate, referred to as a salp.

“It will capture those salps, and basically rip the inside of the salp out, but keep enough of the cells on the inside that it’s more or less alive. And then [it] uses the salp as its own little house,” stated the NOAA researcher narrating the full video.

“I think it’s rare that you see one animal wearing another animal as a hat,” stated one researcher on the preliminary livestream.

In a somewhat ominous response, one other scientist then chimed in with, “not in the deep sea.”