Gerrard Kaonga
Oh wonderful... new terrifying nightmare fuel has been discovered deep in the Antarctic Ocean.
It's amazing how many different creatures roam the Earth, with mankind continuing to discover new species to this very day.
However, the latest new thing to be discovered is likely to send shivers down your spine.
Scientists have called the new creature an Antarctic strawberry feather star, but you really shouldn’t let the cute name fool you.
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It very much looks like something out of the Alien film franchise, looking sort of like deep ocean face-huggers.
Some of the 'arms' are up to 8 inches long and studded with bumps or feathery tendrils. So, it is a big nope from me as I would hate to come across this seemingly eldritch horror creature.
Nerida Wilson, an invertebrate marine biologist at the Western Australian Museum, spoke about the importance of this discovery.
Wilson and her colleagues reported the Antarctic strawberry feather star and three other feather star species in a study published in July in the journal Invertebrate Systematics.
She said: “As we continue to understand how diverse ecosystems like the Antarctic are, or other difficult-to-sample habitats like the deep sea, we should continue to appreciate how precious and important these areas are in sustaining a diverse marine ecosystem."
This new study adds seven species of these creatures - four were the newly discovered ones, and three were critters that had been originally misclassified as other kinds of animals before DNA sequencing was invented.
Wilson added: “The application of molecular tools to understanding biodiversity is widely applicable and has become a necessary part of understanding all living things.
“As we continue to understand how diverse ecosystems like the Antarctic are, or other difficult-to-sample habitats like the deep sea, we should continue to appreciate how precious and important these areas are in sustaining a diverse marine ecosystem.”
Angela Stevenson, a postdoctoral researcher at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany who was not involved in the study has also spoken out about how important these discoveries are.
Discoveries like these, regardless of how terrifying the creatures may appear, they better allow us to understand the ecosystem in the area.
Stevenson said: “It is fantastic that the authors have done this taxonomic work. It is what ecologists like me depend on to do our work because the first step of understanding species interactions is knowing who’s there in the first place,”