Divers encounter mysterious blob off Turkey
Lutfu Tanriover was diving off his hometown of Fethiye on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey when he and fellow divers encountered a mysterious blob drifting 72 feet below the surface.
The divers didn’t know what to think of the 13-foot wide translucent sphere that was soft and gelatinous looking. Tanriover, who shot video of what he called “The Thing,”
that they felt a mixture of excitement and fear as they approached the unknown sea creature.
After the video was posted, Dr. Michael Vecchione of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History was the first to come forward with a possible identification, saying it looked like a huge squid egg mass.
And he told Deep Sea News that it’s the largest he’s ever seen.
Vecchione suspects it came from a large red flying squid called
Ommastrephes bartramii, though no one has ever seen it lay eggs before. The white dots in the sphere are said to be the eggs, though the larger structures in the egg mass have not been identified.
The only other known egg mass such as this one was the one Danna Staaf and her colleagues documented for the first time in 2008. It was a Humboldt squid egg mass found in the Gulf of California, and it was between 10- and 13-feet wide, making it the largest egg mass every recorded in scientific literature,
.
That
600,000 to 2 million eggs, or 10 times more than any other squid ever recorded.
Why these squid egg masses don’t wash ashore or aren’t encountered by divers more often is likely because they are usually found in deeper water and the eggs usually hatch in three days, limiting the time they could be seen.
All of which makes this a rare sighting, on two fronts.
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