Today’s random object is an isopod, a giant isopod from under the sea. They are deep, deep sea creatures.
One of the coolest things about them is that they evolved on land. Their ancestors came out of the water and then became isopods on land and then decided to go back into the water. They have cousins that are still land animals, roly-polies. We in the United States call their cousins roly-polies, those bugs that just roll up into a ball when you touch them. These were land animals and they went back into the sea.
These creatures are about 300 million years old, a very, very old animal. They actually show up in the fossil record because they have so many hard parts, that very hard shell that they carry around with them. They are little armored tanks. Their mitochondria says that they are 300 million years old.
The giant isopod was discovered by French zoologist Alphonse Milne-Edouard in 1879. The one he discovered in the Gulf of America was about 14 inches long. You got to imagine him from his point of view, that is a huge bug. That is all he would see it as, a big bug, a big giant sea monster bug. They find that these things can go like five years without food. They are all hip to tell you that it can go five years without food, but none of the sites that I discovered last night will tell you how they know it can go five years without food. All it says is there was one in captivity that went at least five years without food. It may be one of those cruel things that people have been known to do to animals.
They eat the detritus that falls from the upper levels. The dead whales and seals and squids and octopuses sink to the bottom and these guys clean it up at the bottom of the ocean. These things live at about 7,000 feet deep. Their waste gets eaten by microorganisms that then move between the deepest sea and the not so deepest sea. It brings the nutrients back up to the top. They are not endangered by any stretch of imagination, but there is concern about human activity on the seafloor might disrupt them.
These things get up to 20 inches long and 4 pounds, which is about the size of a breadbox. They are in the same family with shrimp and lobsters and crabs. They taste like shrimp. The land bugs, the roly-polies, taste like shrimp too, but the land bugs only get up to about a half an inch. You would have to have 4,000 of them to make a meal.
I did not get around to telling you about the tongue eating louse. There is one of these types of bugs that will get in there and latch on to a fish tongue and starve the tongue of blood until the tongue dies and then the bug will take the place of the tongue. I thought that was just crazy talk.
Click here to watch this episode of Sketch and Coffee
Also, if you, or a teacher friend, would like a 20-30 minute lesson plan about giant sea isopods, feel free to download and share this one:
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