May 14, 2018 - Meet Deepstaria enigmatica, one of the largest and most mysterious invertebrate predators of the seas. What it eats, where it lives, and what environment it can sustain remain unkown.
Roughly 50 years ago, the French explorer Jacques Cousteau was sniffing around in the deep ocean with the submarine DEEPSTAR 4000. Built in 1965, the vessel helped to identify life lurking thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface before it was retired in 1972. Among those species was a giant, tentacle-less jellyfish, which eventually came to be known as Deepstaria enigmatica.
As the name suggests, D. enigmatica is a mysterious specimen that hasn’t extensively been studied. The jelly resembles a large trash bag, with a thin, broad, delicate bell covered in a net of interconnected canals, and it lives about 3,000 feet deep in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian and Southern oceans. (Related:
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