Peacock Mantis Shrimp - An Explosion of Color Under the Sea | Alien Abyss 101

For as long as we’ve looked up at the stars, we’ve imagined alien lifeforms. Weird creatures, inhabiting strange worlds. But all along, the strangest lifeforms have been living right under our noses, hidden from view beneath the sea. There are animals in inner space weirder than any aliens.

Earth has had oceans for 4 billion years, and incredibly there has been life in our seas for at least three and a half billion of those. The earliest life forms were simple single celled creatures. But some of those clumped together, cementing themselves together with mucus and sediment to form bizarre living rocks. Later sponges and jellyfish pioneered different cells for different jobs, and life as we know it exploded.

Most of the oddballs in our oceans have their origins in the Cambrian explosion, 500 million years ago. As the oceans keep going through upheavals caused by everything from ice ages and asteroids to human interreference, life keeps having to adapt. It’s either that or face extinction. Some of the solutions sea life has come up with are spectacularly strange.

From shrimp that live at the very bottom of the ocean, getting all their energy from hydrothermal vents to the hammerhead’s wing-shaped head and the octopus' incredible eyes, we delve into the reasons why animals are the weird way they are and behave the bizarre way they do.

How do cold blooded iguanas manage to feed on seaweed they can’t digest ten meters below the chilly sea? How does a blind worm catch and eat a fish bigger than itself? How can a sharks walk up on a reef at low tide and lie half braindead in the sun for hours, yet walk away unscathed when the tide returns? Why are there snails with sails, crabs that climb trees, fish on the land and mammals in the sea? Find out in the Alien Abyss.

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