Watch Giant, Pink, Underwater Woodlice Eat An Alligator

You can, if you wish, watch giant underwater – and bright pink – woodlice eat an alligator. The ‘gator is already dead of course, but we’d still not recommend watching immediately after lunch:

To explain:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] A gross, yet fascinating new video shows a troop of deep-sea bugs chowing down on the carcass of an alligator, which researchers from Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) dropped two kilometres (1.2 miles) deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Within 24 hours, the giant invertebrates had somehow sniffed out the rare meal, gorging themselves to the point where they basically became “immobile” or “stupefied”, at times nosediving into the ground. “I was surprised there were already giant isopods all over it,” Craig McCLain from the LUMCON team explains in the video. “I thought it would take a while for them to get the chemical cues that would allow them to sort of locate a food fall like an alligator.” It sounds absurd, and it looks, if possible, even more so. The pink football-sized roaches are called giant isopods (Bathynomus giganteus), and some groups are thought to have an ancient origin in the deep sea, going back 200 or 300 million years. [/perfectpullquote]

All we need for a proper nightmare here is Cthulu turning up to direct his minions in their eating habits….