Experts have identified a “ghost fish” with a transparent body as a creature with an X-rated moniker.
According to experts, the see-through critter known as Thetys vagina is more similar to humans than we realise.
Andy Cracchiolo, a diver, says he encountered the “unusual” critter while swimming in California.
He captured an incredible recording of the Thetys off the shore of Topanga Beach, near Los Angeles.
The animal has a mouth and what appears to be a tail fin in the video, but its transparent body is nearly entirely empty, save for an unusual snail-like bulk towards the back.
Following the release of the video, experts identified the obnoxious monster as the vacuum cleaner of the oceans.
Mr Cracchiolo stated, “I was snorkelling, looking for trash and treasures, and taking photographs, and I thought it was a plastic bag.”
“It looked like a clear, white plastic bag with something that looked like a brown sea snail inside.”
He continued, “I thought it might be something unique, since I often dive this site and hadn’t seen something like it before.”
Andy posted his footage online, wondering whether it was a jellyfish of some kind.
He’s since found that what he saw was a salp – a creature that is sometimes mistaken for jellyfish but is taxonomically closer to humans.
Moira Decima, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography assistant professor in San Diego, provisionally classified the species as Thetys vagina.
The name is considered to have originated in the early 1800s when the word vagina was employed for its original Latin meaning of sheath or scabbard, which was likely inspired by the appearance of the animal.
Professor Decima told, “They are filter feeders, so they eat phytoplankton, microzooplankton and can even eat bacteria due to the fine spacing of their mesh.”
“Their claim to fame is their role in the carbon cycle – they are able to eat so much because they combine swimming with feeding.”
“Thus they can strain very large volumes of water and remove lots of particles. That’s why we can refer to them as the ‘ocean vacuum cleaner’.”
“In turn, they produce large faecal pellets that can sink rapidly to the bottom.”
She went on to say that the snail-like innards metabolise its meal.
“The red nucleus you see in the image includes the gut and digestive organs,” she explained.
According to Professor Iain Suthers of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, animal has a closer relationship with humans than many people realise.
“They are in the same phylum – the major zoological division of life – as our own,” he explained.
“That always humbles my students.”
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And they might end up on your dinner plate in the future.
“They are virtually unlimited by food, but predators such as fish, birds etc love to eat them,” he explained.
“They are quite nutritious we’ve found. Maybe humans will eat them one day.”
Salps can live for a week to several months, depending on the species and surroundings.
They drift with the ocean but also feature a tiny jet propulsion system, drawing water in at one end and pushing it out at the other by contracting bands of muscles that ring their body.
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