The ocean is basically just a different planet that happens to be stuck to ours. If you look at the Magnapinna squid, you aren’t looking at a normal animal. You’re looking at something that feels like it drifted off a sci-fi movie set from the eighties. It has these "elbows." Imagine a squid with long, spindly appendages that bend at sharp angles, trailing nearly twenty feet behind a ghostly, hovering body. It doesn’t pulse or swim like the calamari you see in a harbor. It just drifts.
People freak out when they see footage of an alien-like creature deep ocean dwellers like this because our brains aren't wired for the bathypelagic zone. We understand gravity. We understand sunlight. Down there, those rules are suggestions at best.
The stuff we keep finding in the Midnight Zone
Honestly, calling these things "alien" is a bit of a disservice to the ocean, but I get why we do it. The environment is so hostile—crushing pressure, absolute darkness, near-freezing temperatures—that evolution had to get weird just to keep the lights on. Sometimes literally.
Take the Barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma). For years, people thought it just had a weirdly shaped head. Then, researchers at MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) used high-def remote vehicles to realize the fish’s head is actually a transparent, fluid-filled shield. Those two little indentations on its face that look like eyes? Those are olfactory organs—basically nostrils. Its actual eyes are the glowing green orbs inside its skull, pointing upward to track prey against the faint glow of the surface.
It’s genius. It’s creepy. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a life form on Europa, yet it's sitting a few miles off the coast of California.
Why do they look so strange?
It comes down to survival. In the deep, you can't be heavy. You can't have big air pockets in your body because the pressure would crush you like a soda can under a steamroller.
- Bioluminescence: About 90% of deep-sea life makes its own light.
- Gelatinous bodies: Think of the Blobfish. In its natural habitat, it looks like a normal fish. We only think it’s an ugly alien because we pull it to the surface and its structural integrity collapses.
- Gigantism: For reasons scientists like Craig McClain still debate, some things just get massive down there. Look at the Giant Isopod. It's basically a pillbug the size of a small dog.
The alien-like creature deep ocean reality: The Bigfin Squid
We have to talk about the Bigfin squid again because it’s the king of this category. There have been fewer than 20 "official" sightings in history. When the Shell oil company captured footage of one near a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the internet lost its collective mind.
The tentacles are the weird part. They aren't thick and muscular. They are thin, like silk threads. They hang down, and then they suddenly "elbow" out to the side. Scientists think they use these as "sticky traps" to catch tiny organisms drifting by, but we don't really know for sure. We are still guessing about the basic life cycles of these animals.
That’s the humbling part of marine biology. We’ve mapped the entire surface of the Moon and Mars, but we’ve seen less than 5% of the ocean floor. Every time a ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) goes down, it’s a coin flip whether we find a new species.
The "Black Smoker" ecosystems
In the late 70s, we found hydrothermal vents. Before that, everyone thought life needed the sun. Wrong.
Around these vents, you find Giant Tube Worms (Riftia pachyptila). They have no mouth. They have no stomach. They are basically just long tubes filled with bacteria that turn toxic chemicals from the earth's crust into food. They look like giant sticks of lipstick. If that isn't an alien-like creature deep ocean encounter, I don't know what is. It changed our entire definition of where life can exist. It's why NASA is so obsessed with the moons of Jupiter. If it works in the Mariana Trench, it can work in a sub-surface ocean on Enceladus.
Misconceptions about "Monsters"
The media loves to call these things monsters. They aren't. Most of them are actually quite small. The Fangtooth fish looks terrifying in a macro photograph—it has the largest teeth of any fish relative to its body size—but in reality, it's only about six inches long. You could hold it in your hand (though you probably shouldn't).
The pressure is another thing people get wrong. People ask why we don't just bring these "aliens" up to study them in an aquarium. You can't. Most of them would literally melt or explode. Their cell membranes are specifically designed to be "liquid" under high pressure. When you take that pressure away, the chemistry of their bodies fails.
How we actually find them now
We used to just drag nets along the bottom. It was messy and it destroyed everything.
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Now, we use tech.
- ROVs: These are tethered robots with 4K cameras.
- AUVs: Autonomous underwater vehicles that "hunt" for interesting chemical signatures.
- eDNA: This is the cool one. We just take a cup of water and sequence the DNA in it. We can tell an "alien" creature is nearby just by the skin cells it shed.
The real threat to the deep
It’s easy to look at a Dumbo Octopus or a Frilled Shark and think they are safe because they live so far away. But they aren't. Deep-sea mining is the new gold rush. Companies want to scrape the "nodules" off the sea floor for battery metals (cobalt, nickel).
The problem? These ecosystems grow in slow motion. A sponge down there might be 2,000 years old. If you stir up a cloud of silt, you choke out animals that haven't evolved to deal with "dust." It’s a silent, dark world. Any disturbance is a massive shock to the system.
Actionable steps for the curious
If you want to keep up with these discoveries without waiting for a viral TikTok, you need to go to the source.
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Follow the Ocean Exploration Trust (Nautilus Live). They livestream their dives. You can literally watch scientists see a new species in real-time. Their commentary is great because even they get excited and start yelling when a weird jellyfish floats by.
Also, check out the Schmidt Ocean Institute. They recently found a "graveyard" of extinct megalodon teeth and discovered new hydrothermal vents in the Pacific.
To really understand the alien-like creature deep ocean phenomenon, you have to stop looking for monsters and start looking at biology. These animals aren't "weird"—they are perfectly adapted. We are the weird ones for trying to live in a world with a sun that burns our skin and a lack of pressure that makes our bones brittle.
The best way to support deep-sea conservation is to stay informed about deep-sea mining regulations. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is currently deciding the fate of these habitats. Your interest keeps these "aliens" from disappearing before we even learn their names.