The vampire squid lives in the dark middle layers of the ocean, around 600 to 900 meters deep, where almost no sunlight reaches. It’s small - about a foot long - and has bright red skin, deep blue eyes, and a cape-like webbing between its arms that looks vaguely like a vampire’s cloak. Hence the name.
When something tries to attack it, the vampire squid does something genuinely weird. It pulls its arms up and over its body, completely inverting itself, until the spiky inner surface of its arm webbing is facing outward. Suddenly it looks like a tough black spiny ball with no soft parts visible.
It also glows, faintly, from light organs on the tips of its arms - which it can flash on and off to disorient predators. After 80 million years of refining all this, the vampire squid is one of the most successful deep-sea survivors. It’s a fossil-lineage animal still doing its old tricks.
