Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Rob and Joe discuss the recent discovery of a strange new deep-water predator and highlight some of the various weird, wild and downright gnarly hunters that haunt the deepest, darkest depths of Earth’s oceans.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in a series we are calling Hunters of the Dark Ocean, focusing on predators that operate in deep marine environments and folks, full disclosure if we sound like we're broadcasting from the bottom of the sea ourselves today. I think Rob and I are both maybe operating at lower power than usual.
I don't know. Do do you have a story here, Rob?
Oh, just that I'm battling a cold and as of right now, all the cold medicine is like firing at full throttle.
Oh nice, So we time to just right, Yeah, time.
To just write. It may wear off halfway through and you need a listener and get to get to appreciate like a slightly gravelly sexier voice for me as we discussed various slimy creatures that live in the depths.
Yeah, so I was up a lot last night. It's just childcare related lack of sleep.
But hey, here we are.
We're coming to you once again, folks. So brief recap on part one of this series. In the last episode, we kicked things off talking about the science news story that originally inspired us to look at this topic of deep ocean predators. That was a paper published last November in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity by Weston at All documenting a newly discovered genus and species of predatory crustation which is found in the Atacama Trench in the southeastern Pacific. The species was given the name del Sabella common chaka the Sugary Darkness. As we talked about, and oh boy, that really sent us down a rabbit hole of scrutinizing bizarre deep sea amphib body forms.
It was a good time. Yes.
We also talked a bit about the general challenges facing organisms, including predators that live in the deepest parts of the ocean, not just pressure, darkness, and cold, but also unique resource challenges. Since sunlight doesn't reach the bottom of the ocean, it is generally devoid of the primary photosynthetic organisms that form the base of the food chain at the surface. Instead, the deep ocean food chain tends to build off of a couple of things. First, chemosynthetic organisms like bacteria and archaea that feed off of hydrogen sulfide and other compounds from geological sources like hydrothermal vents, and then second dead organic material and detritus that rains down from the sun touched ocean above. This is sometimes called marine snow. It includes everything from fecal matter and tiny dead organisms sinking down, things sinking down of every ape and size. And we also talked about the fascinating temporary ecosystems that spring up around a big payload that falls from above, like a whale carcass when it hits the bottom and the abyssle or hatel zone.
Yeah.
And one of the things too that we were driving home in that episode, and we're going to continue to stress here and subsequent episodes, is that there is a great deal of biodiversity in these depths, and it basically runs opposite of what the prevailing theory was at one point that you would just see a steady decline in biodiversity down to nothing and there would just be no life in the ocean past certain depths. And we know that's not the case now, in part due to things like the marine snow, the whale falls and those hydrothermal environments as well, but also just in general, creatures that have evolved to thrive at depths that we used to think we're maybe just not possible.
But anyway, back to recapping part one. After we talked about those general issues and talked about the predatory amphipod, we looked at a totally different order of oceanic predators, known as sciphonophores, and we discussed the fascinating way that their bodies are put together, the versions of these organisms that are as long as a whale as thin as a rail, catching prey in a sort of net made from their own bodies. And then we discussed how, despite most sightings of siphonophores occurring at less extreme depths, Rob you turned up some research that included probable sightings of predatory siphonophores at Haitel depths down within the Mariana Trench. That's right, and so today we're back to discuss more.
Now before we jump back in with the predators, though, I want to just quickly discuss an example of a scavenging organism in the mid depths. A polyget worm called pobious messis, or simply the balloon worm as it's more practical, it's more common name, because it does look like a balloon. It has a small body, it's like one point five inches or thirty six millimeters long, and it kind of looks like I've seen it described as like a plastic bag, like a plastic bag that is filled with fluid. It's very translucent looking. And basically that marine snow. All of those bits of flesh, fish poop, and other organic detritus that just drifts down from the depths above. That's literally all this thing eats. And these things are quite abundant according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. They play a key role in cycling nutrients like carbon from the ocean's surface down into its depths. And also, no doubt these are the prey animals for various predators in the depths as well.
Yeah, and that lines up with something we talked about in part one, where in these deep habitats a lot of the prey species being scavengers. So again we got this, you know, the kind of marine debris, organic debris of various kinds raining down from above. Then you've got the animals that scavenge off of that dead material, and then you've got the predators that come and eat those scavengers, and then perhaps also you may have predators that eat those predators. But certainly you have lots of predators that eat the scavenging things, scavenging things like amphipods that we talked about last time. So there is an animal that I want to bring up, a deep sea predator that I came across just kind of randomly, that I wanted to focus on for a bit, because yes, it looks weird, but it looks weird in a way that is biologically connected to some themes we've been exploring and will continue to explore some more. And that is an abyssle predator known as Hypnop's mead ee or the gridi fish. So that genus and species is spelled ip and ops and the species is mead. I I want to give a shout out to the place where I learned about this fish. It was in a mission log hosted on THEAA Ocean Exploration Hub from May twenty seventeen by an oceanographer named Astroid Lightner at the time of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I looked her up, and I believe she's now affiliated with Oregon State University. But in this post, Lightner is talking about what she and a group of colleagues found during one particular exploration dive in the Central Pacific Basin, specifically a soft sedimented abyssle plane around what's called the Clipperton Fracture Zone at a depth of about forty four hundred meters. And just want to note that the overall expedition here, so this was one dive on a larger expedition. The overall expedition was called Mountains and the Deep exploring the Central Pacific Basin. And one cool connection here is that she's mentioning some of the other scientists involved in this dive, and one of them is a previous stuff to blow your mind guest Diva Aimon, who if Yeah, if you want to check out an interview that we did with a marine biologist who studies the deep sea, you should look up our episode with her in the back catalog. It's got to be well, probably five or six years ago now. But yeah, Diva Amon spelled Amo.
N Oh, Yeah, she was great. The only guest we've had on the show I think that has actually personally been personally been down into the deep ocean.
I remember that being a good episode. I enjoyed talking to her. But anyway, in this post, talking about this dive in the Pacific, Lightner is describing a survey of organisms that these researchers did over this kind of vast, relatively flat, sedimented patch of seafloor. Now, in the last episode, we were talking a good bit about the Hadel zone, like the deepest forty five percent or so of the ocean by depth if you're just looking vertically. Of course, the Haitel zone is limited to ocean trenches, so that's a small minority of the ocean's horizontal surface. Most of the ocean floor is not nearly that deep, and it's what we would normally call the abyssal zone. That's what we're looking at here is the abysstal zone, so not deep deep in the trenches, but still very deep. It's just the floor of most of the regular part of the ocean. And talking about this abyssal plane, Lightner says that these habitats have long been assumed to be what she calls biologically monotonous. I interpret that to mean you would expect to find roughly the same distribution of species all across them. But then she says, you know, really that was just sort of a guess. There were not enough observations of these habitats to know what life forms were there and if there were major variations in species throughout the space. So Lightner says that during this one dive that she's talking about the most abundant fishes they found on the seafloor. Here were the fish that I mentioned at the top of this segment, I knops Meade or the gridye fish. This was named after a twentieth century American ichthyologist and named it Giles Mead. And she says that they cataloged seven of these fish during one dive exploring the soft sediment, and that they're actually pretty easy to spot because of their huge, highly reflective eyes.
Now you might be trying to picture them in your head.
How reflective, How easy would these things be to spot? Well, Rob, I want you to weigh in here after looking at a picture in the outline.
Oh wow, yes, that's rather distinctive.
So the fish's body is long and tubel like with dark pigmentation. It appears to be gliding along the ocean floor right over the top of the sediment, but on the top of its head, So not really the front. It's like right down on the top, it looks like somebody has scooped out two little lima bean shaped depressions in the fish's skull. And then so if you imagine them together, like the flat sides of the lima bean shapes are facing inward touching one another. So like put two lima beans right next to each other with the flat sides together, and you scoop out that volume from the skull, and then you paint in the two scooped out regions with neon yellow glow in the dark paint. So it really does look like those toys I had when I was a kid, a little monster where you hold it up to the light bulb and then you turn the light off and it glows. Looks exactly like that. Now, this little guy might not look especially threatening given the Lisa Frank eyes, or I don't know, maybe it does look more threatening. I guess I'm sort of reminded of some kind of movie poster. I can't remember exactly what it is, but there's a monster that has eyes like this, just big, you know, undifferentiated neon yellow spots. But whether or not it looks threatening to you, this actually is a predator eating small abyssle crustaceans. And while I think its biology is not fully understood, it seems that these bony plate like neon bean cup eyes lack a lens and thus cannot resolve images. So it is seeing in a way, but it's probably not seeing images. Instead, these things are thought to only detect the presence or absence of light. They're more like light spots, and thus are probably designed by evolution to sense bioluminescence.
From nearby prey.
And I was thinking about this, and I think it's just so interesting the different ways that light as just a type of energy features throughout the trophic relationships. At the surface where there's plenty of sunlight versus at the bottom of the sea, light plays a role in the food chain in both places, but those roles are so different. So the surface light plays the primary energy role at the base of the food chain. Light from the sun powers photosynthesis and plants and other autotrophs, and that sets off the chain of eating that goes all the way up to the top predators. And then, in addition to its role as the base energy input on the whole system, it also provides probably the most important type of information that fast moving animals use to survive and negotiate predation relationships from either side of the predator prey relationship. So whether you're a predator or a prey animal on the surface, one of your main jobs is seeing other animals and in some cases avoiding being seen. It's all an information game based on reflected light from the sun deep at the bottom of the ocean. It seems that light is still a major energy input on the food chain because of course it powers the food chain up above at the surface, which then at some point rains down as the marine snow or the whalefall for the scavengers at the bottom of the ocean. But there is also at the bottom of the ocean a different energy input. You got the energy input from chemosynthetic organisms around like sea floor vents and things, and then also down in the abyssle or the hatel darkness. Light plays an important relationship in this information competition between predators and prey, but it's not reflected light from the sun that plays that role. It seems to be primarily bioluminescent light and the way that it contributes to that struggle for information advantage between predators and prey is a bit different.
That's right. Yeah, it is that it's not a realm where there is no light, but the sort of like the rules of light have changed, the importance of light has changed. And so I guess you could look at the grid eye fish here as being an example of a case where evolution has just decided, you know, we can scale back on the eyes a little bit. We still need them, but we need them for just specific things. And the next example we're going to discuss is one that kind of goes in a different direction entirely with the eyes. It really feels more like a scaling up but also a hyper specialization of its ocular equipment.
Tell me more.
So, I'm going to warn you that this creature's common name does sound a bit ridiculous, and it may earworm you with a Beatles song. But we're talking about strawberry squid here. Strawberry squids forever so called for their red coloration as well as the little marks on their skin that really do look like the seeds of a strawberry.
Oh, they so do.
I mean, if you zoom in on the skin of this thing, it's uncanny how much it looks like a strawberry.
Yeah, because sometimes you know the naming of these creatures that it can be a bit off and just you kind of have to squint a little bit to see it for yourself. But here's pretty spot on. Its scientific name is histiotouthis heteropsis, and the heteropsis gets more to the point here as it translates to different sight or different eye.
Oh yes, okay, so this is the squid.
If people have seen a picture of this before and the thing you didn't notice about it was the strawberry texture of the skin, you may have noticed the two wildly different looking eyes.
That's right, almost kind of a I'm reminded of the whole sleep with one eye open thing, but it has like but they're both open, but they're just different sizes and they see in different ways. It's pretty amazing.
It's like the christ pantocrater.
So, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, our strawberry squid here reaches a maximum mantle length of teen centimeters or five inches, and its habitat is the midwater region of the twilight or mesopelagic zone, so we're talking the upper portions of the ephotic zone, the dark ocean, but the dark ocean. Nonetheless, However, the strawberry squid may reach depths of three thy three hundred feet during the day, but then migrates to shallower waters at night.
Okay, and so we've talked about organisms like this before. I mean, one great example being the sperm whale that operates at in radically different light regimes at different parts of of its sort of feeding cycle. Like it might come up to shallow waters, of course, the whale would have to come up to the surface to breathe, but then it dives very deep into the dark in order to feed. And this would be another type of organism that goes a little bit more up into the light zone and then down into the darker zone.
Right right. But of course, unlike the sperm whale, and the sperm whale does at different phases of its life have to deal with predation. But this critter is more like your common housecat, being both predator and prey at all times. You know, not so much in the confines of your house, but in the confines of the natural world. So there are two properties that are especially revealing here with this organism regarding life in the deep. First, I want to talk about a little bit about its strawberry coloration and as well as the seeds. So again those are not seeds. Obviously, those little marks on its red flesh are bioluminescent photophores. Those are light emitting organs. Now, in general, cephalopods use photophores for different forms of camouflage and antipredation, and they can pop up in various locations on the cephalopod body plan. But for the strawberry squid here they're on the outer skin and the purpose here does qualify as anti predation.
Okay, so that's kind of hard to understand because you would think that you would think that lighting up your body would attract predators, not repel them.
So how does this work?
That's right, Well, we have to remember that this is the twilight zone. Some light does make it down this far during the day, and if something is looking up at you from beneath, it will see your outline against that filtered light. If you put in like sci fi film setting, imagine a starship, large starship powered down. It's just a dark form, but it's moving against the stars, and with a keen eye, you might notice that when you might think, well, if you wanted to disguise your powered down vessel, if you were to cover it with little shiny stars, well, that might help mask your appearance. That it might allow you to blend in to the starfield. And that's sort of what's going on with the strawberry squid here. It uses its bioluminescence to mask itself against to blend in with the filtered down light from above against predators below. I have a quote here that explains this general adaptation. This is from a nineteen eighty three text by Richard Edward Young titled Oceanic Bioluminescence and Overview of General Functions. He writes, quote, this function is the only one for which we have substantial experimental data. The hypothesis is an old and simple one. Dahlgren nineteen sixteen suggested that blue light from the ventral photophores and squids would cause these animals in deep water to blend with the sunlight when viewed from below. The process that allows a mesopolagic animal to eliminate its silhouette with bioluminescence and thereby conceal itself requires a very sophisticated mechanism. In the animals that utilize it.
Well.
For maximum effectiveness, they must precisely match their luminescence to the intensity, angular distribution, and color of the downwelling light. For those that counter illuminate in near surface waters at night, where the flight field is much more variable than in deep water, the mechanism must be especially complex.
Wow.
So it's almost like what we see in the movie Predator in a way where you know the predator's invisibility. Cloak seems to be a way of kind of projecting an image of the light patterns from behind the alien onto the front facing side of it, so that when you're looking at it, it's it's like a movie screen showing you what you would expect to see if the thing were not there from the from the backside. It might not have to be that exact with with like outlines and images in the case of the squid, but it does need to very closely match the light intensity and the color patterns and angular distribution of the light that would be coming down from above otherwise.
Yeah, So to humanize this sort of light show, it may not be as as impressive as watching say a cuttlefish or some other you know an or or some sort of you know shallow water octopus blending in when it's environment with its camouflage. But it is a complex act, nonetheless, So it isn't just a matter of like, let's just throw some stars up there on your hide so that whatever's below can't can't make you out. Like. It's more nuanced and it's about hitting the right light intensity at all times. Now, that strawberry red coloration, that's a little bit more straightforward, but it reveals another curious relationship with light in the deep. This is one we've touched on before in the past, and it is red. The color red, maybe the color of caution. And notice on the surface, you know, it is the color you might wear to a wedding if you want to attract attention that sort of thing. It is the color of it's a flashy color. It's a sports car color, right, But in the depths it's a stealth color. And that's because red light doesn't filter this far deep, and so red organisms appear quite black in the natural illumination i e. Not like submarine illumination, thus further cloaking the organism here in question from predators, but in a more passive way.
I see, so like it's because the longer wavelengths of visible light don't make it as deep in the water, so the red, the more red colors just don't really get reflected. Everything's kind of blue shifted down there.
Yeah. But finally we have to talk about the strawberry squid's eyes and greater depth here. It does have very weird eyes again, different sizes, one big tubular and yellow lensed, and this is to keep an eye out above for the shadows of prey moving through dim waters, and then there's this much smaller specialized eye to keep an eye out below for bioluminescence of potential predators.
So it's looking for shadows that it wants to eat and glowing things that want to.
Eat it, yes, exactly. And it's I mean, it's really hard to think about this in terms of like the human perspective, because I mean you might imagine, like, what if I had one eye to see really well in the day and one eye that would see really well in the night, well sort of, And in fact, there were older theories that that's what was going on here, that this squid had two different eyes, one for when it was at lower depths, in one when it was a greater depths. But this would only work. This human example would only work if you were living in the sort of environment that this creature lives in, in which you were on the threshold of darkness and light pretty much at all times.
Yeah, I mean, in a way, we do have eyes that can function in high and low light conditions because we have adjustable size, Like we can adjust the aperture of the pupil, so you know, they contract and when there's a lot of light and dilate when there's less light.
But this is fit.
Yeah, this is squid is in a different situation than we are because we are almost never in a situation where we need to be looking in one direction where there's more light and in another direction where there's less light. Also, we have been knock killer vision, so generally we're looking in the same direction with both of our eyes to get a perception of depth. Instead, the squid really has eyes on the back of its head whichever way you look from, and one way needs to be looking toward the sky and the other eye needs to be looking away.
Yeah. Another imperfect way of thinking about this would be like if you had a human with one normal eye and then one eye that was essentially blind but saw really well into the astral plane, ever on the lookout for astro zombies that are coming to try and kill you. So these eyes apparently differentiate as the squid enters adulthood, distorting the shape of the head to accommodate the larger upward gazing eye. And the dimorphism is because it's a creature again with an eye and two realms of light at the same time. And I was reading a bit more about this. Thompson, Robinson, and Johnson explored the creature's asymmetric vision in a twenty seventeen paper published in Philosophical Transactions with the Royal Society b. They point out that the dim to dark mesoplagic region of the deep sea boasts the highest diversity of visual adaptations in the sea. A lot of evolutionary energy has to go into scraping out a survival story in this region, dealing with bioluminescence below and filtered sunlight above, but it is quote a fertile environment for eye evolution. Now we mentioned that that upward gazing eye has a yellow linb and they point out that this may be used to break up the counter illumination camouflage of their prey. They found it in sixty five percent of the specimens that they looked at. Yellow lenses are apparently common in upward looking deep sea organisms as well, like in fish, because they're thought to quote break counter illumination camouflage by enhancing spectral differences between down welling sunlight and bioluminescent camouflage. So it's geared at deciphering the very sore of counter illumination CAMO camouflage that it itself uses.
Mm okay, So it's like it simultaneously is wearing a kind of lead shielding and X ray glasses.
Yeah.
They point out that body posture is also key. They position themselves with their head and arms downward, with the posterior mantle pointed upward in a vertical posture, and this ensures that they're pointing their photophores downward again to cast that counter illumination spell. And I think it's just such a fascinating example of a form that has evolved to thrive in a delicate environment. So their predators include various sharks and also even whales. And as for what they themselves prey upon, stomach contents suggest a mix of fish, other squid as well as crustaceans strawberry squids forever.
Let me take you.
Down all right now. The next deep sea organism I want to talk about is the fin deep sea octopuses of the genus Grimpotothus, commonly referred to as Dumbo octopuses because I mean, well, just look at them. Included a couple of images here for you, Joe. They're adorable and they boast earl like fins that remind many of Dumbo, the flying elephant.
They look tremendously like Dumbo. Yes, extremely cute and with big floppy ears and almost yeah, I kind of elephantine shape to their lumpy head body mm hmm.
Sometimes the position of their arms also kind of reminds one of a trunk or trunks, like it's some sort of weird multi trunk elephant, that sort of thing. So the Dumbo octopuses, they're members of the Serena suborder of octopods, who are notable for having evolved away from jet propulsion in favor of fin propulsion. So if you've ever consumed any cephalopod a media, or you know, learned about them in the past, you know that I think squid are some of the more fabulous examples of this. They use jet propulsion. They take they they take in a bunch of of water and then they jet it out to push them along through the water, often at you know, nice high speeds.
Well marine rockets, yeah.
Little marine rockets. Uh. These octopods, however, have jettison back. They also tend to lack anal flaps and ink sacs, so they can't jet ink, which is another common self defense mechanism of cephalopods being able to just squirt out that cloud of ink and make a quick escape.
Yeah, it's like the it's like the Batman, you know, smoke escape pom. Right.
And they also lack chromatophores, so they can't adjust their coloration. They can't do any kind of blending in with their environment other than what their uh, their their natural coloration is all ready providing. Okay, their arms are web together, which also earns them the informal name of umbrella octopuses.
Oh well, that's just adorable.
So what we have then, is as a bunch of creatures that seem to have just abandoned most of like the really expensive, evolutionarily speaking, self defense mechanisms that their can have evolved in favor of a more just sort of drifting, leisurely existence. Now why would that be, Well, it has everything to do with how deep they actually reside. They reside at extreme depths of at least thirteen one hundred feet or four thousand meters, putting them squarely in the abyssopal agic zone, so way down there, not quite into the Hadel but still pretty turned deep like way like in a way, we keep mentioning the Hadel zone as being like, this is the extreme, this is where the real depth happens. But no, the Hadel zone is just that extra topping on the invert did cake here and everything is already just crushingly deep before we reach that threshold.
Yeah.
Us talking about the ocean trenches was not to suggest that the horizontal surface of most of the bottom of the ocean is not that deep. It is the regular abyssle zone is deep.
So what are the dumbo octopuses eat? Well, first of all, they're not that big, eight to twelve inches in length, and here in the depths they foread for pelegic invertebrates generally close to the seafloor in the area that they're thriving, but they don't. It's important to note they don't like crawl around seemingly on the seafloor like like other octopods are observed to do. They live, you know, in the water. They do go down to the sea floor as well, though, to lay their eggs, generally on deep water corals. But otherwise, yeah, they're free swimming, dreamy floaters in the depths that have you know, cast aside all of their evolved andry. And it's because you know, they don't seem to have to deal with that many predators. They do have predators, you know, generally diving predators from above, but it seems that they likely lost their various costly defense mechanisms because they thrive in a rather depopulated region of the deep.
Okay, And this is a type of adaptation that we've seen in other animals and other ecosystems, where you know, you can lose a lot of your defenses if you just adapt so that you are able to thrive in a difficult environment where they're not a lot of predators.
Yeah, it reminds me in an imperfect way, I'm sure of when I was a kid, I would look at all these airplane illustrations and sketches, you know, and like the er some of your higher altitude planes they often had like really like cool looks, you know, like the SR seventy one Blackbird or you know, various strategic bombers and all. But then when you get to the U two, which is a very very high it was you know, a very high altitude spyplane. You know, it looks looks a little dumb, and it just has really long wings, but it's you know, it's it's altitude was its defense. And in a sense, this is this is kind of like the inversion of that, like its depth is its defense, and therefore it doesn't need, you know, to look crazy. It doesn't need to you know, have a bunch of guns on it or in this case, you know, it's various octopid defense mechanisms. Now, their reproductive systems also speak to their isolation, and we see this in other organisms. We're going to discuss another one, I think in the next episode. If you're if you're thriving in an area where there's just you're basically in a desert, well you're you're not going to run into potential mates as much either. I mean, you're not going to run into foes, but you're also not going to run into potential friends. So a female keeps multiple eggs in various states of development inside of her body, and she can also store sperm for extended periods of time as well, thus making the most out of these infrequent encounters with the opposite sex. Furthermore, the mother doesn't stay with the eggs once they've been laid. According to a twenty eighteen article by Shay at All in Current Biology, the young here hatch as fully confident juveniles, so a newly hatched dumbo octopod can immediately begin carrying on, feeding and so forth like any adult born.
Ready.
Yeah, so I love these guys. I mean they're weird looking, They're definitely weird, But their weirdness is one of isolation and a casting off of defensive adaptation speed ink camouflage, because they've adapted to live so deep, not so deep that they can't be found by predators, but seemingly such predation is just far less common. However, it is stressed in some of the literatures looking at that they do deter predators by ballooning up. That's one thing that they kept like they can balloon up their bodies and their umbrella arms to appear larger than they actually are. This, of course, is a common anti predation feature, and so they've they've held onto that one. That's one that they I guess it's not too costly from an evolutionary standpoint, and they can keep that one for when they need it.
But in the case of this animal, that just sounds adorable. Look, I'm big and scary.
Yeah, indeed, how big and scary could they? Could they end up looking? Yeah, it seems like that's, you know, kind of like a last ditch defense mechanism. But for the for the most part, it's just I'm so deep, you're probably not gonna find me. The odds are with me that you can't find an eating all right, Where We're gonna go ahead and close out this episode of stuff to blow your mind, but we're gonna be back. We have more to discuss in our look at dark ocean predators, you know we have. We're gonna get back to a creature we mentioned in passing in the first episode, and I believe next episode is also going to be the one where I get to discuss one of the deep sea predators that are or if you've probably thought up any like when are they going to talk about this one? Well, the next episode is probably the episode. In the meantime, Yeah, write in, We'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture episode, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
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