Horrible Deep Sea Thread

>horrible
NO BULLY

Start with tentacle things.

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>>54321157
I assure you I mean horrible in the best possible way.

Anyways, I'll probably should start with a basic explanation on what is the deep sea. It's, obviously enough, the deep part of the sea. More exactly, it covers all the stuff below the thermocline and below the seabed, extending down from about a mile or so. That covers most of the volume of the ocean. Seeing how only the first 200 meters of the ocean get enough sunlight for photosynthesis (and all light disappears completely at less than 1 kilometer) and the pressure rises enormously the deeper you go, it's hardly suprising that untill late 1800s it was assume nothing but bacteria and maybe so crustaceans could survive there. But turns out that guy from Jurassic Park was right and life will find a way.
There's quite a lot of fish living down there, although the population density is extremely low, and they seem to be doing just fine despite the darkness, cold, crushing pressure, and limited amount of food. Living at those depths requires specific adaptions, though, which mostly boil down to looking like something that crawled out of HP Lovecraft's nightmares.

Thus you've got an ecosystem that seems to be mostly populated with things with pitch black slimy skin, way too many needle-like teeth, strange glowing appendages, and extendable stomachs that can hold prey bigger than themselves. You know, cool stuff.

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>>54321200
OK. How about the Vampire Squid from Hell (actually a literal translation of the things scientific name). This terrifying creature lives in the oceans' oxygen minium zone 600 to 900 meters down where it...feeds on tiny flakes of organic matter drifting down from above. And when confronted with a threat it pulls the black "cape" connecting its tentacles over its head like a blanket and hopes the scary thing goes away (and also sprays glowing ink to distract it). Well, that's kind of anticlimatic. I expected more from something called a freaking vampire squid.

No, the vampire squid, despite being far too gentle creature to live up to its badass name, is a quite interesing animal. Aside from looking strange with its membrane-connected tentacles covered with fleshy spikes, they're not actually squids. Or octupus, for that matter. They are infact the last survivors of a lineage that used to be more prominent when the dinosaurs ruled the earth, but got largely replaced by modern squids and octopods. Now they only survive at depths where oxygen content is too low for regular squids to live in.

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DARK COLD VORE HELL
pic related eats so much that sometimes food starts rotting before it gets to digest it
forming gases lift the fish up

>>54321151
>about 80-90% of the world's ocean depths are unexplored
>25% or more of the world's ocean surface is unexplored
>it's entirely possible that big sea monsters exist
>some scientists even believe megalodons may still be alive

I love scary deep sea shit so much.

It's a shame they're putting chemicals in the water to turn the freakin' frogs gay though. We'll find sea serpents but they'll be unable to restrain themselves from sucking our dicks.

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Then there is, of course, everybodys favourite legendary gigantic deep sea invertebrate, the giant squid (unless of course you prefer the colossa squid, which is ok as well). The inspiration of countless oceanic legends, the actual animal isn't quite as impressive as the fictional krakens, but its still huge for a squid. The mantle is longer than a man is tall, and measured from the tip of the mantle to the feeding arms, the total length is up to 13 meters (the colossal squid is actually slightly bigger, at 14 meters), making it one of the longest animals alive. They also famously have the largest eyes of any living animals (and beaten by one genus of ichtyosaur for the largest eyes of any known animal to have lived). Not much is really know of them, as they've been very rarely observed alive and in their native habitat (most specimens we have are dead ones that washed up on shore, thei flesh is rich in ammonia and is lighter than water so when they die they often float to the surface), but they are predatory, appear to mature very fast, and are eaten by sperm whales.

>>54321625
I love the distressed expression of the fish in every drawing where it's eaten something substantially bigger than it.

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>>54321667
The best I've seen from serious scientists is that C. megalodon might've survived until the end of the last ice age, and even that is based on evidence that is at best extremely sketchy and most likely completely unreliable. There's probably huge amounts of weird creatures we have no idea about lurking there but C. megalodon is unlikely at best to be one of them. It seems to have gone the way of "killer sperm whales" like levyiathan that specialized in hunting whales when the ice age started and altered the migration pattern and size of whales.

Speaking of sperk whales, that's a truly faschinating creature. It's a highly specialized member of its family, havinf adapted to hunting prey (primarily squids) at immense depths, while many of its relatives hunted other whales. This turned out to be a good move since all of its large relatives went extinct. The name "sper whale" (aside from eliciting immature giggles) is actually short for "spermaceti whale", spermaceti being oily substance found in an organ inside the whale's massive head. The purpose of this organ appears to be a part of what can only be described as an organic sonic blaster. Sound waves emitted by the photic lips pass through the oil (which conducts sound far better than water), then bounce back through the melon while being amplified and focused. The sperm whale can produce sounds as loud as a jet engine, and uses sound not only to echolocate but also as a weapon, firing focused sound pulses to stun or kill its prey.
They also have the largest brains of any animal and communicate by emitting clicks compsoed of thousands of millisecond-scale sound pulses, kind of like how information with fiber-optics except with sound instead of light.

>>54321691
Don't care if people call me retarded, but I believe that ships back the day (I'm talking like viking age give or take) may of been attacked by giant squids. We have reports of them attacking ships in WW1 and WW2.

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>>54321709
The actual fish's expression isn't all that different.

This is the aptly named balck swallower (aka. the horrible vore-fish), notable of being capable of swallowing prey far larger than itself. A lot of deep sea fish do that, but the black swallower does it even better than most. This particular individual tried eating a fish four times its size, which seems to have been too much as the stomach has ruptured, but they are known to have succesfully eaten prey over twice their size and ten times their weight.
Most specimens collected are ones that have floated to the surface after eating prey so big they couldn't digest it before it started to decompose, and the decomposition gasses lifted the fish to the surface like some kind of grotesque balloon.

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>>54321946
If they're sick or dying they can rise to the surface, and have been known to grab at things, including boats. Probably what served as the inspiration of legends about krakens and such, just like the oarfish has likely inspired stories about sea serpents. Obviously a lot of the stories have been greatly exaggerated over time, though.

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Speaking of horrible vore-fish, it's one of my favourite orders of animals, the saccopharyngiformes, or gulper eels. They're practially nothing but a huge mouth and little else. They've lost the ribs, swim bladder, scales, most fins, and multiple bones on their skulls. They're pretty much what you get when you take a fish and remove all the extraneous features untill you've left with a mouth, a stomach, and whatever bits that are absolutely vital in keeping the thing together.

Of the two most well known families, there is the pelican eel (eurypharynx, one species known) which is smaller exhibits more extreme reduction, and the gulper eel (saccopharynx, multiple species known), which is larger and has a bit more distinct body (it's mostly stomach, though) compared to the pelican eel's "mouth attached to a tail" look. Pelican eel appears to feed on small crustacens, squid and fish, and seems unequipped for eating very large prey, with its weak jaws, practically nonexistent teeth, and not very distensible stomach. The gulper, on the other hand, has multiple rows of small but sharp teeth and a huge stomach that can hold prey considerably larger than itself. Both are assumed to hunt by swimming around with their mouth open untill something blunders into their jaws, or by holding the luminous organ at the tip of their tail in front of their mouth to lure prey in.

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On a side note, I love these various old illustrations of deep sea critters. Aside from a gulper eel (and its unfortunate meal), this one contains a tripod fish and...I'm not actually sure. I think that might be a ratfish or chimera (also a bobtail eel barely visible at the top).

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The last member of saccopharyngidae isn't quite as impressively weird at fist glance, but it actually manages to outweird its relatives when you look a little deeper. Called monognathus, or onejaw, due to literally having only one jaw (no seriously, it has no upper jaw at all: all the bones of the upper jaw have been completely atrophied!), and still somehow manages to have a single tooth where the upper jaw should be, attached directly to the braincase. Also, the tooth is venomous because of course it it. As far as we can tell, it rams its prey (mostly small crustaceans) with its venomous skull-tooth to kill them and then eats them. We don't really know much from them due to them living at such extreme depths (living up to 5000 meters deep, they are among the deepest-living fish). Quoting an actual ichtyologist "their
odd morphology and their near total lack of sense organs make it difficult to imagine how they function and survive
in their environment."

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On the subject of saccopharyngidae, might as well dump some of the pictures I have before moving on to next subject.

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Probably the only picture I've found that actually shows multiple species of gulper eels at once (the other one I have is a scientific paper that just shows the tail tips of theree species, since the differences in tail filaments and light organs is apparently the easiest way to tell them apart). They all tend to look very similar, though.
Number 1 there is actually a pelican eel.

These are by deep sea standards relatively large fish. Gulpers can be over 2 meters long, although 1/2 to 2/3 of that is the long and thin tail. Pelican eels are smaller, about 0,75 m (2,5 feet) long.

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Moving onto your number one source of deep sea horror-fish: stomiiformes, or dragonfish and dragonfish accessories. Stomiiformes is a very large order and also contains plenty of more normal looking fish (and also those marine hatchetfish that look like the "scream" painting when viewed from front), but are most famous for dragonfish, viperfish, stareaters (yes, there's a deep sea fish called the stareater. It looks the part, too) and other serpentine fish with enormous needle-like teeth and mouths that really should not open that wide. They're pretty much your archeotypical monstrous sea serpents, only tinier (largest species, the barbed dragonfish, is 0,5 meters long, most others are between 0,15 to 0,25 m). For deep sea fish, many genuses are relatively active, being able to swim fast for short bursts and rising closer to surface during the night to feed.

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By the way, I wasn't exaggerating when I said their mouths open wider than they really should. Some dragonfish can open their jaws practically 180 degrees. This kind of stuff would normally be impossible, but dragonfish have actually lost the bones on the vertebrae immediately behind the skull, allowing them to move their jaws in a way that other vertebrates simply can't.

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And speaking of doing crazy things with your jaws, there's the stoplight loosejaw, which can do...this. Whatever you call that. Its lower jaw can spring forward to spear its prey, even lacking a bottom to reduce water resistance for maximum speed (strangely enough, the vast majority of its diet is actually made out of small copepods; how it eats them with a hole in its lower jaw is anybody's quess). The stoplight loosejaw has also another weird trait, which is the source of the second part of its name (the "stoplight" part). It can see and emit red light. Since red light is the first wave length of light to be absorbed by water, most deep sea fish can't even see it, and many are coloured red as a mean of camouflage. The stoplight loosejaw, however, can see red, and the the red light organs under its eyes allow it to illuminate its field of vision while remaining invisible to its prey. Incidentally, it produces the red light using a deriative of chlorophyl of all things.

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>>54321151

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>>54323124

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Dragonfish larvae are weird as well, with some genuses having their eyes at the ends of long stalks. As they mature, the stalks are reeled in to the skull, and are present coiled up behind the eyes even in the adults. Other larvae have intestines longer than their body just sort of hanging in a pouch under the fish.

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>>54323140

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>>54323164

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>>54323180
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needlefish#Danger_to_humans
>Needlefish, like all ray-finned beloniforms, are capable of making short jumps out of the water at up to 60 km/h (37 mph)
>Their sharp beaks are capable of inflicting deep puncture wounds, often breaking off inside the victim in the process. For many traditional Pacific Islander communities, who primarily fish on reefs from low boats, needlefish represent an even greater risk of injury than sharks.
>The second was a 16-year-old Vietnamese boy, stabbed through the heart by the 15 cm (5.9 in) beak of a needlefish in 2007 while night diving for sea cucumbers near Halong Bay.
http://www.sportfishingmag.com/news/needlefish-attacks-russian-tourist-and-paralyzes-her

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>>54323260

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>>54323260
Still considerably less embarassing than being smushed by a breaching sunfish (people have died that way before, and if there is some kind of afterlife I bet they never lived it down).

Anyway, it's getting late here so I'll head off. I'll be back later if this thread is still around.

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>>54323300

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>>54323322

>>54323322
That "sea-serpent" has fucking legs.

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>>54323337

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>>54323356
I know. I don't make up the classification.

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>>54323392

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>>54323436

>>54323585
Ok - what the everloving fuck is that?

>>54323856
google says 'weird-looking starfish'

>>54323180
Poor sea-pig.
https://youtu.be/_y4DbZivHCY

>>54323856
The focal point of my nightmares for the foreseeable future.

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>>54321625
>>54321709

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I would absolutely love a Subnautica-esque setting
; crash-landing on a water planet and having to survive with what little tech you can scavenge and learning to live off the alien environment.

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>>54323165
If I saw this picture outside of this thread, I would immediately think of that as some planet-swallowing space leviathan

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>>54323856
Its a basket star, a strange aquatic creature which feeds primarily by ensnaring plankton and small crustaceans in its expansive, branching arms. Like many aquatic invertebrates, it gets a bit... saggy when pulled out of the water.

>>54326173
The crazy thing about considering alien life is that every animal in this threat is infinitely more related to you than you would be to any alien. Nature is amazing.

>>54323140
chosin unded lite de fire nd sugseed lerd gwin

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>>54321625

>sometimes food starts rotting before it gets to digest it forming gases lift the fish up

I didn't think I'd ever have to go jerk it from seeing a picture of a fish. Welp. Time to rock and roll!.

>>54321946
>We have reports of them attacking ships in WW1 and WW2.
wait, what

>>54326146
what is that, a fucking powerup?

>>54326316
Aww, that makes me sad, now. Poor thing.

>>54326146
What's going on in this video

I think I know but I am probably wrong

>>54327629
You don't recognise the fearsome hadouken fish?

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>>54326955
>>54327629
Don't eat copepods. When they get scared they fire off a blast of extremely bright bioluminescent material. The result is a blinding blue blast that disorients enemies. The fun part is that copepod blasts function on a timed reaction so it's sort of like a biological depth charge.

So, say you wanted to make a Purple Worm variant that was a Bobbit Worm in Pathfinder, how would you go about it?

>>54323322
>>54323392
>>54323356
good thing it's 'cryptozoological' and not real.

>>54328772
Make it underwater, mostly. They automatically grapple on attack in PF, don't they?

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>>54326210
That is a smug fucking sea-baggie.

>>54328772
In the pathfinder book: Dungeon Denizens Revisisted, they have a variant purple worm that they call Mottled that is aquatic and instead of a poison sting, it has a poison bite, gain a swim speed of 30, and have a reduced burrow speed unless in sand or mud. CR 12

>>54329175
yeah, they have improved grab and swallow whole.

>>54321946

Sorry anon but there are no reported cases of this. But here is something true. Cookie cutter sharks do attack subs and have been known to take chunks out of its softer areas. Disabling their systems so much they would have to return to base for repairs. This little shark can fuck a sub up.

>>54329458
>This little shark can fuck a sub up.
Emphasis on the 'little' part. It can't be more than a foot long.

I think the person talking about ships getting attacked in WW1 and WW2 by giant squids is confusing one isolated report from a german sub that sank a ship, which exploded launching a giant CROCODILE out of the water for a while. Then there's a photo of a Megalodon next to a sub.

As for giant squids or octopi attacking ships, I for one don't buy it. Cephalopods don't attack stuff larger than themselves and you'd have to be quite loco in the coco to go into blue water in a smaller boat.

>>54326177
The funny part to me was that they always make this ridiculously loud bell-flop when they land, and that they're stunned for a few seconds after they hit the water.

So when you're on the ocean at night, suddenly you'd hear the very muted sound of them exiting the water, closely followed by them loudly greeting the ocean...
>THWAP
>THWAP
>THWAP
>THWAP
>THWAP
...For like four hours straight. It made normal conversation with other people on the boat damn near impossible some nights.

So, I know octopi are fairly sharp little buggers, but does any anon know if squid are the same way? And, if any scientist has figured out if giant squid are what we'd call intelligent? I know we haven't exactly gotten the chance to interact or study a live one because of where and how they live, but this thread has gotten me wondering.

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>>54321151
I'm writing a Call of Cthulhu adventure where the party is made up of guys on a boat going out to the cold waters of Greenland to study these guys before things get all eldritch. The first sign things are wrong is when the eye parasites that seems to infect every living member of the species pops out and bites when they're trying to tag one. Not particularly deep in the sea but I figured it fit the spirit of the thread.

>>54321569
> "And when confronted with a threat it pulls the black "cape" connecting its tentacles over its head like a blanket and hopes the scary thing goes away"
That's adorable, some drawfag needs to give it a cute anime girl form immediately.

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>>54321151
jesus fucking christ I hate the ocean

>>54322598
#6 looks terrifyingly human

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>>54330381
>>54327240
oh hai

>>54330027
Deep sea octopus are strangely adorable, especially considering how everything else down there seems to look horrifying. Perhaps their defence against predators is looking so cute that nobody wants to eat them?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYLWlERyNIc

>>54329849
Greenland shark are interesting in that they seem to be the most long lived vertebrates, potentially living up to 400 to 500 years if not more. There's sharks living in the arctic waters that were already centuries old when the industrial revolution happened.

>>54330436
>The authors further concluded that the species reaches sexual maturity at about 150 years of age
what the fuck man

if all this shit lives on the same planet with us, just imagine how aliens will look like

>>54321910
Awesome!

>>54323300
What is this?

>>54326177
Why are they doing this?
>>54329745
I'm now laughing too

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>>54330027
Ask and you shall receive. Not that I'm a proper drawfag, mind you.

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Not deep sea, but certainly horrible.

Some species of sea louse have developed one of the most extreme breeding systems in the animal kingdom. Adult females are ambulatory and adult males live in specially dug burrows. The males are set up kinda like ant-lions, except instead of catching prey they catch females. They capture females, drag them into their dens, and rape them. After raping them, they leave the female in a literal pile of other raped females. The females are usually too weak from being attacked to escape, then quickly become so bloated with young that they cannot move. The females swell to twice their original size and become translucent due to the sheer number of live young inside them. Eventually, the swarm of babies eat their way out of the mother and swim out of the burrow. The males eat what's left of the females they capture.

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>>54330931
>The males eat what's left of the females they capture.
well fuck, that's on a whole another level

>>54330898
>Vampire-chan lifts up her skirt when spooked
Lewd baka.

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>>54321151
Heck yes man I've missed you.
>inb4 gay

Are you also looking for non-existing creatures ? Cause I think I got all my actual ones from you so I may as well start with the fictional.

>>54329218
that's definitly what a shoggoth is suppose to look like

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>>54326344
The funny thing about those comb jellies is that they're pretty much as close as you can get to an alien lifeform on Earth. Their exact location in the evolutionary tree is still somewhat unclear, but they're about as far removed from other animals as you can get.
Some scientists claim they're leftovers from the Ediacaran period, predating all modern multicellular animals and sharing practically no connection to them. Some say they are a sister group to all other animals or that they've diverged from the last common ancestor with all other animals (which may have been sponges, but others claim that sponges may have arisen independently from all other animals) before the Cambrian Explosion. In any case, they're almost unrelated to any living animal except in that they're still animals.

>>54329218
Its a beroid. A sea-baggie that eats other sea-baggies. Or comb jellies as is the proper term. They're quite efficient at it too. There used to be a big problem in the Black Sea when some ship accidentally introduces comb jellies there and they started breeding out of control and eating all the plankton and baby fish. The problem mostly solved itself when some other ship accidentally introduced beroids there and they ate most of the other comb jellies (although I wonder if they might need to introduce something that eats the beroids now).

>>54330898
fug yes abyssal doodleman isn't ded

ur art a shit and I love it

Are there any deep sea creatures that would make interesting demon heads?

>>54331200
are there any that wouldn't?

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Oh I see you didn't talk about my favorite terrifying thing that lives in the deep.

Anglerfish !

Alright most of them don't live in the deep but some do. And apart from having a face only a mother could love and scaring the shit out of children in Nemo, this one has a... Peculiar mode of reproduction. Well, some of them do. But here it is :

When scientists starded studying the bodies of Anglerfish they found, they realized all of them were females and didn't understand how they could produce eggs (which they did). After further examination though, they found out that the atrophied weird things attached to their body were males.

Male are much, much smaller than females and their sole purpose is to find a female that's not been bitten yet, bite her stomach and quite literally fuse with her (her blood starts flowing in his body and he kinda dies but not really) in order to act as a literal zombie testicle in order for the female to give birth.

Yeah. I know.

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>>54331200
Considering most of them have the whole "creepy eyes, huge mouths and way too many sharp teeth" thing going on, I'd say most of them. Then you also got ones like the marine hatchetfish which look like some kind of damned soul screaming in agony (you would too if you were stuck in underwater vore hell).

I based a category of summoned eldritch creatures (commonly referred a Horrors) on deep sea creatures. Hunting Horror (which appear in the Cthulhu mythos and is the source of the naming convention) = viperfish with wings, Devouring Horror = gulper eel + azhdarchid pterosaur, etc.

>>54330931
Holy shit. Literally just like in my japanese porn.

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>>54331270
Deep sea nglerfish are cool. They're also more varied than people usually think. While many have the standard "angry-looking sphere with big teeth" look, you've also got some with long filamented fins, wolftrap-jaws, non-spherical body, lure on the inside of their mouth, or no lure at all but teeth all over their face.

>>54331350
Top left looks like a nerd

>>54331338
It's fun how there are so much variations of it and still it looks fucking retarded every time.

i'm pretty sure most of this shit evolved in the ocean as a lomg-term defensive measure against human acquisition of nukes because fuck me do these things make a compelling argument for going all curtis lemay on them.

>>54331462
I'd say the reason life evolved to survive on dry land was to get as far as possible from the things in the sea.

>>54331183
Thanks. I've been here all along, just haven't drawn much (I did some science fiction stuff but haven't posted it here). I've been thinking of doing a semi-playable hack of the Horrible Deep Sea Adventures game based on DnD for the hell of it, but haven't really done anything on that.

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>no magnapinna so far
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPRPnQ-dUSo

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>>54321151
Friendly reminder that the Deep Sea is the most likely location for a Shadow Biosphere, the "alien-life-on-Earth" hypothesis.
http://www.astrobio.net/retrospections/a-shadow-biosphere/

>>54330701
Helmet sea urchin. It has armor instead of spikes.

>>54330931
Ok, that's fucked up, even for Nature. Reminds me of that legless insect brother who is raped and dies before being born.

>>54332884
>Reminds me of that legless insect brother who is raped and dies before being born.

The what now?

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>>54332923
See the before last post

>>54331668
Kinda yes
>sea is full of competitors
>land is full of plant food and no one takes it
>fish like mudskippers that had better walking fins and breathing stuff get to eat it and grow fat and beautiful

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>>54321709

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Vampire Squid-chan was cute so I drew some more of her.

>>54333393
Why? Like, how is this even possible? Why would evolution do this? This seems detrimental to literary everybody involved, just a un-ending cycle of incest and reverse abortions.

>>54334712

Evolution is not a set path, it just happens and it doesn't care. If it benefits the creature great, if not oh well.

>>54334712
Selfish genes, anon.

>>54323856
It's not Bennings!

>>54336036
Explain this at once!

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>>54330027
>>54330898

have some existing art

>>54330399
Oh that's just not right...

>>54336200
You've heard of the Worm That Walks, right? Well, that's the Worm That Swims. A type of free-swimming polychate worm, to be exact, I think.

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>>54336240

>>54326146
Is this how the mechanicum does plasma guns ?

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>>54336240
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRuIJzTzBCw

>>54330983
You haven't been reading your Shindol.

>>54334712
>Why would evolution do this?
Because it works. If it didn't work, it would stop.
Evolution is not a path. It's a process.

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Hagfish are fun. They're stricttly speaking not fish. Or vertebrates...maybe. It's not quite clear really. I think the current view is they have rudimentary vertebrae and therefor can be considered vertebrates. At least they have a skull 8made of cartilage, although the brain is protected mostly by a fibrous sheath). They've been around for at least 300 million years and haven't changed practically at all during that time (indeed, most of their features appear primitive to all vertebrates, indicating they have split off from the last common ancestor extremely early on, and may even be direct descendants of the last common ancestor of all vertebrates). They have no jaws, but a pair of rasping "teeth" compsoed of keratin, multiple hearts, and a single nostril. They also produce copius amounts of extremely sticky slime, with a single hagfish being capable of turning up to 20 liters of water into slime. They primarily eat worms and dead fish, but will occasionally burrow inside sick and dying fish and eat them from the inside.

>>54337048
>pic
"KISS MEH!"

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>>54336940
I like Iguanamouth's deep sea mermaids. They're properly freaky. Too bad she's only done four pictures. I'd like to see her take on dragon/viperfish, black swallower, telescopefish, and some of the odder anglers.

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>>54337363

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>>54337382
I haven't actually brought up cookiecutter sharks. They're small sharks whose jaws have adapted to biting out chunks from large marine animals like whales (really, icecream scool shark would be a more accurate name considering they carve up a hemispherical piece of flesh off the animal). For such a large animal, it's harmless but I can't imagine it being very comfortable. They've also been known to bite holes into the soft plastic covering submarines' radio antennae, ruining the electronic components.

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The actual sharks, recreating that "laughing bitches" reaction image.

>>54337141
MAMMY!!

>>54337448
>Eeeehh, low depth? Kimoooooi!

>>54331177
>although I wonder if they might need to introduce something that eats the beroids now
And the next thing you know, there are mongooses in the mailbox.

>>54336652
>all plasma gun are actually full of small copepods that vomit plasma
considering we are speaking of dark age tech, it wouldn't be that much of a surprise if this was actually true
especially considering nids actually vomit plasma themselves

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>>54335935
kek! You win today's prize!!

>>54326177
Underwater flap-flaps want to become sky flap-flaps.

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>>54331270
>literal zombie testicle in order for the female to give birth.
Hold me, bros....

>>54330762
Because it's fun, anon. They're playing.

>>54337013
this

>This entire thread
Welp, I'm never sleeping again.

>>54329218
That is triggering a definite primal revulsion and fear response in me. That gif makes it look like it has formless eyes staring into my soul.

>>54331812
horrible deep sea adventures sounds like a module I'd find in /osr/

>>54331354
HEY GUYTH WHUTH GOIN ON, I GOTH ME THOME BEERTH WANNA GO DRINNKTH THEM?

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>>54323357
every time I see a gif of this thing I'd swear it's CGI

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>>54339488
I was referring to the not-DnD I had the deep sea mermaids play (or be player characters in; I was just being lazy and didn't bother coming up with separate designs for their players), based on some comments on the thread I originally made these for.

I'd assume it'd be DnD with deep sea merfolk races, plus some kinds of racial class options (since Black Swallower's class is supposed to be just Black Swallower).

>>54337048
One of my characters was a water genasi whose passion (second to beating people up for the Bitch Queen, of course) was alchemy. She'd occationally stroll into the depths during her free time and harvest hagfish for experiments.

Her crowning achievement was hagfish-infused rum that functioned as a damage reduction potion. Complete with pickled baby hagfish, like snake tequila.

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>>54339484
That's a siphonophorae. Aside from being corporeal manifestation of Yog-Sothot (the Untranslatable Sign, the Key and the Gate, the One-In-All ad All-In-One), they're colonial organisms composed of hundreds or thousands of individual polyps. The Portuquese man'o'war is the most famous example. Some of them can be huge, considerably larger than the blue whale (although obviously much lighter since they're 99,9% water and jelly, and lose the title of biggest animal anyway since they cheat and are made up of many tiny animals).

>>54329779
I know cuttlefish are supposed to be very intelligent, though maybe not as intelligent as octopi

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Speaking of weirdness in the sea...

>>54339970
There's no mention of the abrupt curve inside the female dolphin's vagina, so this was not written by someone who has indeed, put his penis inside one.

>>54337048
I read somewhere that if the hagfish produces too much slime, it ties itself in a knot and squeezes the slime out of itself.

>>54340106
That's somewhat comforting... but how do you know that?

also:
https://youtu.be/BF9rKO_HFSY?t=29

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>>54339837
>Aside from being corporeal manifestation of Yog-Sothot
Glad I'm not the only one that Knows.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

jibjib

>>54331177
>Something that eats the beroids
"Thats the beauty part. When winter rolls around the gorillas simply freeze to death."

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Sea is not for horrible. Sea a cute!

>>54340400
that looks incredibly poisonous

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>>54330931
Well I didn't expect to get an erection when I came to this thread, yet here I am. What the fuck.

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>>54340400
>>54340412
Adorably poisonous.

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>>54340426

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>>54340454

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>>54340482
More colorful invertebrate

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>>54340522

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>>54339837
Interesting fact. Some species can colonize the inside of the human lungs, in sufficiently high-moisture environments. It is said to be an agonizing way to die.

Now I just made that up, but it's not implausible

>>54323337
>I'm virgin Anon, it's genetics!

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>>54337448
AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

>>54340853
Are those plastic googly-eyes on those dried fish?

OP, this is a great thread. I will thoroughly enjoy reading the rest of this later

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>>54340896
Yes.

>>54340426
>A rare glimpse of the Pride Parade Nudibranch.

>>54340134
That is tru

Reminds me of that new show, A Centaur's Life, cutesy slice of life under a grimdark world. The whole premise is evolution took a turn - in our universe, four-lobed fish survived and evolved, while in theirs, SIX-lobed fish survived and evolved, causing centaurs, angels, daemons, and animal people to appear.

>>54329458
>>54329509
I'm the anon. I found information of the passenger liner, known as the 'Britannia' being sunk by a German raider in WW2. The survivors were "attacked" by a Giant squid (By that I mean one person was pulled underneath and another man was able to fight it off and had scars to show it) so they didn't actually attack any ships though. However, I did find some information about a yacht in 2003 being molested by a giant squid until the captain stopped the ship and it lost interest. Also there's an interesting story of a giant squid attacking a schooner in the Bay of Bengal and sinking it. Interesting stuff.

>>54344246
My apologizes, the information of the Britannia was wrong. Lt. Cox(the man with the scars) was stung by a Portuguese Man o' War, and somehow the dragged man was taken by a Manta ray. Holy shit, Manta rays can eat people?

>>54322598
>>54330381

#6 even has a tattoo of a shoe on his shoulder.

>>54344308
Only by mistake/accident. I don't think they can actually *swallow* a human, but they do have those wide mouths.

>>54344572
How the story went, an Indian servant lost his legs to sharks (since they're all hanging off the sides of the lifeboat), and then the motherfucking Manta ray comes up and BAM! grabs him, folds it's wings on him, and starts devouring him in front of Lt.Cox

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>>54321151

>>54330399
God dammit /d/

>>54344596
Do manta rays have actual teeth? I thought they just ate krill and shit like whales do.

Imagining a manta ray slurping on some guys legs is very entertaining though.
> I'm gonna eat you, I swear! You better be scared!

>>54334183
Aw. I like it.

>>54345617
> Mantas have about 300 rows of tiny, peg-like teeth, each about the size of the head of a pin. The crown of each tooth has a blunt surface with three weak ridges. These teeth are often indistinguishable from the denticles (scales) inside the mouth and are not used for feeding. They may play a role in Manta courtship and mating

>>54345677
Oh, neat. You'd probably get whatever part of your body they got in their mouths turned into hamburger since I'd guess it's like heavy duty sandpaper, but at least you'd live.

>>54328004
It's not just that it disorients enemies but it makes them more visible and likely to be eaten.

>>54337048
Kinda looks like Hope Solo

>>54345617
Their tiny teeth are harmless to humans, but manta rays have killed people. Either by breaching like in >>54326177 and THWAPing on top of some poor bastard on a boat's deck, or by accidentally getting their "arms" tangled up on a person (usually diver's oxygen tubes). Manta rays kind of have a design flaw where they sometimes get their arms hooked up on things and go into full panic mode, swimming at great speed to random direction untill the object hopefully falls off. For a human that can be deadly.

Here's one getting stuck on a camera and swimming away with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5wY38dhFPA

>>54321910
>sperm whale
>frontal sac
>junk
Heh

>>54330399
I recognize this artstyle

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>>54348615
I'm not sure who it was, but they've made a few deep sea mermaid pictures.

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>>54321151
OP, thanks for reminding me why I come to this board.
Marine biology and especially the deep stuff have been a great love of mine since I first discovered it way back as a kid.
You're doing the good work.

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Lantern-Bearing Sea Devils form Station 74 still makes for an awesome name for a 1950s-era science fiction movie.

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The biggest anglerfish, also known as the apptly named giant sea devil, is around 1,6 m long (the female, that is; it's one of the species with parasitic males). Considering most anglerfish are somewhere between a tennisball and an orange is size (and shape, although most oranges have less teeth), that's very impressive.

>>54340106
That and the original text is older than 4chan.

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A giant ostracod (it's a small crustacean enclosed in a spherical shell). Trust me, by ostracod standards this is absurdly gigantic.

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The scaly-footed gastropod lives near hydrothermal vents and incorporates iron sulfide dissolved in water into its shell and scales, making it one of the few animals that can incorporate metal into their bodies (some parasitoid wasps also have metal-reinforced ovipositors). The military is apparently investigating it for potential applications (I'm assuming in creating soldiers with metal-laced bones like space marines, although I won't rule out giant armoured battle-snails yet).

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Still the only decent-ish picture of a gulper/pelican eel skull I've found, which is still one of the weirdest skulls I've seen. The neurocranium (the "actual" skull, with brains inside) is tiny, with the jawbones stretching far past it.

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>This is a Japanese anglerfish

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Ogrefish are by deep sea standards insanely durable, being able to not only be brought to surface without collapsing or exploding, but also being able to be kept alive in aquarium conditions for weeks to months. They may also have the largest teeth compared to their size, and have special "sheaths" for the lower jaw's teeth to slot into so they don't stab themselves in the brain whenever they close their mouth (Viperfish also have a similar arragement).

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I'm pretty sure I fought this in World of Warcraft back when I was still playing that...

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Aside from the anglerfish, the whalefish is another example of extreme dimorphism in deep sea fish. It took DNA testing to show what used to be considered three different species were in fact on and the same.

Like with most deep sea fish, the larval stages lives in more shallow waters, eating zooplankton and looking radically different from the adults. The female is your standard deep sea vore-fish with a huge mouth (it's able to use its gill-openings to suck in food as well so it effectively has three mouths) and expandable stomach. The male has a big nose and extremely well developed sense of smell, and little else. Its jaws are poorly developed and its digestive system essentially nonfunctional, so it lives only to find a mate and die afterwards. This is also common with deep sea fish. Anglerfish (even the ones without parasitic males) and gulper eels also have males with enhances senses but poorly developed feeding organs, and many deep sea fish do away with having separate males and females alltogether and are hermaphroditic instead (some, like the tripodfish, are even capable of self-fertilizing).

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Aside from being a hermaphrodite capable of fertilizing itself, the tripodfish is notable for having three long fins is uses to prop itself above ocean floor for unknown purposes. Presumably at this heighet the currents bring more food to it than if it was just laying at the bottom. It does seem to orient itself towards current, so this seems like a reasonable assumption. Interestingly the fins are limp when the fish is swimming, and throught some mechanism it makes them rigid enough to support its weight when it needs to "land".

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The telescopefish (not to be confused with the telescope fish, which is an entirely different and unrelated fish) is named for its crazy telescope-like eyes (the scientific name on the other hand comes from the long tail). Its eyes give it binocular vision and let it spot prey in near complete darkness. Aside from the fancy eyes, it has the standard deep sea fish package of pointy needle-teeth and highly elastic stomach. They're relatively big fish by deep sea standards, measuring 15 to 20 cm, depending on species, without taking the tail into account.

>>54322598
Whoa these look son frickin alien barely believable that these niggas are original of and reside in Earth

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This is a crustacean related to isopods that can launch itself from the seabed and swim upside down (the large round bit is the body and the long white lines legs) using its long limbs to propel itself. This is primarily done by females who are carrying their eggs, to keep them safe from predators in the seabed. They seem to be quite good swimmers, considering they've been found hundreds of meters above the bottom.

>>54353124
Why do deep sea fish always have really long and thin tails?

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>>54329745
I enjoyed this post :)

>>54330931
that'll teach those harlots

>>54331316
tfw hell is on this physiscal plane and you're just turned into a "tormented soul fish" to be hunted down over and over by creatures nobody has ever seen. when you try to swim up and escape you just die and are reborn even deeper.

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Probably the most common vertebrate on the planet, the biomass of lanternfish outmasses that of all species of fish caught for food combined by an order of magnitude. Sound waves reflecting off their swimbladders used to confuse early sonar operators by creating an illusion of a "false bottom" above the actual seafloor.

Some research has been done about using them as a foodsource, but as far as I know the idea was abandoned due to
a) prohibitive cost of fishing due to them normally living so deep
b) them being far too oily to make good food
c) not enough information about their lifecycle (they only congregate in large enough numbers to be economically fished in some specific locations and many deep sea fish breed slowly, so fishing them might quickly lead to the area being depleted and it taking decades before the stocks grow large enough for fishing to be profitable)
d) the one time they tried the warehouse they stored the fish in spontaneously combusted.

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>>54353207
Now all I can think of when I look at this picture is a THWAP of epic proportions as the giant sea flap-flap hits the surface.

>>54330931
And it's little biological facts like this that made early naturalists lose any faith they had in there being a god.

>>54330931
>this thread
Why are sea creatures so fucking terrifying?

>>54353290
Nice.

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>>54354705
The blobfish actually looks remarkably normal in its natural environment. Their flesh is very gelatinous, though, so they just collapse without water to support them.

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If you can make sense of this thing's head without looking it up I applaud you. Hint: The eye looking things are its nostrils.

>>54354786
The green parts are the eyes, which face up but can swivel to look forward. There's a tranparent dome over the eyes that protects them from sting of jellyfish or siphonphorae.

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Marine hatchetfish like in >>54331316 seen from the side. They look considerably more normal when not seen from the front.

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I'm running low on pictures. Have some facts about deep sea fish illustrated with horrible deep sea mermaids I made for...Some reason. It was probably because people seemed to like the horrible deep sea mermaids and I figured I could be edutaining (it that a word?) or something.

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>>54353124
That was not the right image to use.

>>54353186
I believe it's because it makes them harder to swallow. Imagine a pelican trying to eat a garden hose vs trying to eat a puppy.

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With these it kind of varied whether I considered drawing the fish or the mermaids the main point, and in this case it was clearly the fish. Anthropomorphising saccopharyngidae is really hard since their most distinctive feature does not translate to humanoid anatomy at all. I gave up and just made them wiiide.

I move that we officially rename the three under water zones the Sunlight Zone, Twilight Zone and Vore Hell.

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I'll be going off now and I expect that this thread won't be up by the time I get back from the work tomorrow. So I'd like to say that it's been a nice thread and I hope people have learned something new. I love deep sea fish and all other weird and strange creatures, and I strive to spread awareness of them when I can.
Insert something about conservation of the oceans and marine life here, because that really is an important topic that people should pay more attention to.

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>>54355863
Already there.

Twilight Zone, Upper Midnight Zone, Lower Midnight Zone ("there's a lower midnight zone?" "We don't talk about the lower midnight zone") and Hadal Zone (from Greek word for the underworld) are actually acceptable terms for zones.

>>54353290
>the one time they tried the warehouse they stored the fish in spontaneously combusted.
I'm sorry what???

>>54356734
I concur with this confusion.

>>54321151

Funnily enough, there's already a third-party sourcebook for deep-sea Pathfinder: Azure Abyss, for the Cerulean Seas underwater setting. I actually played one of the races in that book once, an echinn (sea-urchin people). Sadly, the campaign did not actually take place at the bottom of the ocean.

http://drivethrurpg.com/product/114094/Cerulean-Seas-Azure-Abyss

>>54355737
I TALKED JUST LIKE THIS!!!

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>>54321151
>less than 5% of the world's ocean has been explored

Scientists will tell you it's because of atmospheric pressure or difficulties traversing the ocean depths, or simply its massive size.

We know that it's because shit like this lives down there.

>>54330436
And they're almost all blind and have been for centuries because of eye parasites. We live in a cruel world.

>>54330436
>especially considering how everything else down there seems to look horrifying.

This is what fascinates me most about the ocean and deep sea shit, not only the fact that we've seen far more of the surface of our fucking moon than we have the depths of our oceans but also the fact that the things we have found down there are beautifully bizarre or fucking terrifying to even look at, scarier than anything artists could come up with in their place. Hell, I'd wager the closest would be Lovecraft and even he'd have a tough time coming up with things quite like real creatures of the deep sea.

Any nice info on deep sea Octopus? Or the giant squid?

Also does our pollution even effect the depths of the deep sea?

>>54340771
>It is said to be

Next time say " it is known to be" to give it some extra reality umph

>>54344002
Wait, that got an anime?

Isn't thread more /an/ than /tg/?
Doesn't bother me none, but i just feel like /an/ needs more people

>>54355875
>>54355742
>>54355684
>>54355654
These are awesome. Also your drawing skills seems to have improved a bit, nice job. :)

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>>54359401
No to my knowledge. Some Z-ton's stuff did though.

>>54353290
>creating an illusion of a "false bottom" above the actual seafloor
That's good horror material. The scans show a floor, but it's just a swarm so big it passes as one.
And you don't know how much farther the real floor is...

>>54356734
>>54356769
It ended up solving world hunger, so Big Food sent a saboteur back in time to stop it.

>>54359401
Yes it did.

>>54328772
There's this part in "The City of Dreaming Books" where there is this deep, deep cave full of creatures that once belonged to the deep sea, but have (kinda) evolved to live on land. Its got giant crustceans stalking blindly between stalagmites, huge luminescent, ballonlike jellyfish and all kinds of fun.
Could do something similar to that.

I realise you were asking for crunch ideas, not fluff, but eh, posting it anyway.

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>>54330931
>first fish giantess
>then fish vore
>now this

Why is the sea full of strange fetishes?

>>54360385
It's had millions of years more than us land dwellers to become degenerate.

Also really good at parasites.

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>>54345677
>>54345796
stingray teeth are pretty rad too

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>>54353124

>>54356769
>>54356734
I suspect the "too oily for human consumption" had something to do with it. Call it a hunch.

>>54331316
WE WUZ FISH

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>>54321151
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonostomatidae

>is thought to be (along with Vinciguerria), the most abundant vertebrate genus in the world, numbering in the hundreds of trillions to quadrillions.[1]

>quadrillions

>>54360022
It's pretty disappointing to me that the sea floor is only about six miles deep. Another false bottom would be wonderful.

>>54361716
That doesn't seem even physically possible.

>>54362100
That's what the oceanographer kept screaming.

>>54358875
Most things dumped into the ocean end up in the bottom eventually, so it does affect bottom dwellers. The creatures living in the water column are less directly affected since pollutants either stick close to surface if they're lighter than water or just pass through their environment if they're heavier. However, since the deep sea is mostly dependent on surface waters for source of biomass and already gets at most 10 % of energy surface gets, they're probably indirectly susceptible to changes to surface conditions, like amount of plankton being reduced.

>>54358673
Where they're living you don't need eyes. At least not with a shark's sense of smell and bioelectricity.

>>54355431
You're using the word "normal" in a way I am unfamiliar with.

>>54363577
Normal = ghost fishes that still looked like fishes instead of just ghosts.

>>54331899
this is the stuff of nightmares
the jerky camera movement adds a fair bit honestly

>>54363577
Compared to horrible vore-fish, miniature sea dragons with bear traps for jaws, and fish composed mostly of huge mouth and little else, that thing is downright quaint and ordinary. It can't even swallow things its own size, let alone larger.

I don't think this is deep sea but it scares the shit outta me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mneDhOtVEQw

>>54355482
Deep Sea leatherface

>>54363901
...And now I want to see a reaction image of deep sea mermaids laughing and going "she doesn't even vore!".

>>54364023
Ah, the Six-Gilled Shark.
A slow and goofy friend.

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This seems relevant: https://pastebin.com/y0041Yjm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInHUbz3B_Y

>>54366940
...I don't know what I expected.

>>54362498
I understand this reference. Red Vs Blue, right?

>>54323337
The horrible part is if the skin does not break to let gas out early, the gas can build up until the whale's body literally explodes, firing blubber and guts everywhere

>>54367170
Lemme guess, the Eel is actually dead?

>>54330931
Further proof Mother nature was the first and greatest /d/eviant.

>>54323124
Welp, guess it's time to find a way to burn the bottom of the ocean.

>>54352653
Even when not dried and shrivelled goblin sharks are pretty cool
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9q3BD7gjncQ
Also, I know it ain't a deep sea critter but I firmly believe anyone who has an interest in marine life should see the broadclub cuttlefish
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qjloPutUCeo

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>>54368219
Oh I know that. That's why I have undead explosive whales for my underwater necropolis. The lich makes them rot just the right way to acumulate combustile materials and methane.

this whole thread makes me want to play subnautica again.

Or worldbuild, it could go either way and I love it!

>>54368114
Correct!

>>54369030
I love it!

Why not also use undead whales as submersible aircraft carriers and landing craft?

>>54369243
And if you say i's because you're using reanimated Cephalopods I will be most impressed.

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>>54344246
>By that I mean one person was pulled underneath

>>54326210

The 'star wraith' in Stellaris is clearly based on this.

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>>54369089
Go play Subnautica with the intention of worldbuilding your version, get ideas, put them on paper and go on.

>>54369243
Because there aren't any aircraft. They do work as landing craft, no "zombies somehow are immune to great pressures but can be shoveled to death" stuff from WWZ.

The necropolis does have incendiary baloons made from sea worms mutated to bloat with hydrogen from carcasses within their bodies. They have many flints spread through the body to use when they feel a good target.

>>54369396
I once considered them as giant nautilus using ship hulks as shells, each tentacle handling a paddle. The thing about undead is that they can keep rowing all day all night forever, so fuck sails and lack of good winds.

But to be honest I never thought much about cephalopods.

>>54366940
Are those open pits into its body supposed to be its gills? because it does not look healthy just having gaping cavities filled with strange fronds.

>>54321151
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOeP4p1fjMs
>Welcome to My Nightmare

https://youtu.be/8cn0kf8mhS4

https://youtu.be/3H4J5QDQeA4

https://youtu.be/_8FVpj0p-iU

>>54369966
I just realized the hagfishes look like swimming penises ending in vagina dentatas, gangbanging a dead fish and jizzing all over their food.

>>54369895
Yes, those are the gill slits. I assume they're so large to evacuate water when the fish closes its mouth and swallows its food. Or it might be just because having the gills in a two big holes in your chest is the simplest possible design (normal fish gill arches are one of the many, many anatomical features the gulper eel has lost).

>>54372485
clever, but I suspect the lure might prove too heavy for the tendons attaching it. Not necessarily to the point of falling off, but would likely droop too low for the illusion to work. probably best to have the lure attach directly to the snout at the "neck" of the false-head and evolve to have skin flaps to obscure the actual mouth when closed, or better yet have the jaw hinge in such a way that the teeth appear as a necklace.

>>54330931

>The females are usually too weak from being attacked to escape, then quickly become so bloated with young that they cannot move. The females swell to twice their original size and become translucent due to the sheer number of live young inside them.

>mfw I got a boner from this

There is something deeply, fundamentally wrong with me as a human being. It's like some hidden strand of sea louse DNA in my cells activates and goes "FUCK YEAH, THAT'S HOT."

>tfw I'm a sea louse on the inside

Fucking kill me lads, kill me before it takes me over

>>54373716
Go make a sealouse profile on that roleplay site. You know the one.

See what you get.

>>54373716
There is nothing wrong with being louse-kin, anon.

You just need to get yourself a louse-suit and attend some lousey conventions. Maybe get an account on louseaffinity, and commission some art of your lousesona.

>>54353009
>some, like the tripodfish, are even capable of self-fertilizing
>"Go fuck yourself!"
>"I already have."

>>54374101

>Anons parents discover his horrifying giant lose suit
>Confront him about it
>"THIS IS WHO I AM NOW"

>>54373716
Sadly, thread has reached it's image limit, but I have something for anon, here: - http://i.imgur.com/MuisvUC.png

Jesus Christ what am I doing with my life Jesus save me.

>>54375402

Oh, sweet zombie Jesus why?

>>54375619
The more important question is; why not?

Many, many, reasons.

Too many to count, which is the same as having none.

>>54375402
Save you? We need to fund you!

>>54377191
I guess someone appreciates sea-louse cheesecake.

>>54377688
Unlike the rest of you people, I've been on the internet for years. I've fapped to things that would make a nun catch on fire. You have no idea.