The “first-ever” experiment into sea floor scavengers is helping scientists to finally unravel a great prehistoric mystery – what happened when jurassic sea creatures fell to the ocean floor?
To find out, scientists dropped three alligators to the bottom of the ocean floor and captured on film what happened next.
The researchers from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium were subsequently surprised by how quickly “deep sea vultures” arrived on the scene and made light work of a carcass encased in armour-like skin.
Eerie footage uploaded to YouTube showed giant pink isopods — scavengers which resemble football-sized cockroaches — crawling over and gnawing through the hard outer shell of the dead alligator.
Scientists Craig McClain and Clifton Nunnally said the research team expected the isopods to take at least a couple of days to find and start feasting on the alligators which they dropped in three different locations of varying depths in the Gulf Of Mexico, but it took just 18 hours.
Furthermore, the isopods devoured the alligator so quickly, the researchers noted in the video that the crustaceans were “immobile or stupefied”.
“Giant isopods are like deep sea vultures,” Dr Nunnally told Atlas Obscura.
“They’re just hanging around, waiting for something big to fall down.”
The team who conducted the experiment also speculated that alligators were a good modern-day stand-in for a prehistoric Ichthyosaur.
Ichthyosaurs were enormous carnivorous sea reptiles that ruled the ocean and evidence procured from their fossils indicated that mollusks and bone worms lived on the carcasses.
In Dr McClain’s eyes, the American alligator or Alligator mississippiensis is the closest thing the 21st century has to an ichthyosaur.
“If we put an alligator out there, will we capture the last refuge of a species we didn’t even know existed?” he told Atlas Obscura.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event wiped dinosaurs off the planet 66 million years ago but not alligators and crocodiles.
The American alligator first popped up 200 million years ago and has looked virtually the same for the past eight million years.
“Indeed, alligator and crocodile food falls may be the last remaining refuge of specialised invertebrates that were also in ancient oceans,” the video says.
The research team said it plans to return to the sites within two months to see what other species participated in consuming the alligators.
Dr McClain said they might even capture “the last refuge of a species we didn’t even know existed”.
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