Submarine captures footage of tiny 'transparent' creature: 'No bigger than a baby carrot'

Hidden deep in Monterey Bay's "twilight zone," a remotely operated vehicle captured incredible footage of what appears to be a young glass squid.

As SFGate detailed, scientists observed a "nearly transparent baby animal" swimming solo some 1,600 feet below the surface. The mesmerizing footage was shared on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's YouTube account.

The zoomed-in, high-quality footage offered a glimpse into the secret world of the deep ocean, where hardly any sunlight reaches. For glass squids, it provided new insight into their evolution from hatchlings to adults.

"This new observation, captured in ultra-high-resolution 4K, allowed us to zoom in on a juvenile likely no bigger than a baby carrot and reveal more details than we have been able to see before," Kyra Schlining, a research specialist for MBARI, told SFGate.

Glass squids can eventually grow to over 6 feet long and migrate even deeper into the ocean, to 1.5 miles below the surface in the midnight zone, where sunlight doesn't reach. The so-called twilight zone, where the footage was taken, ranges from 650 to 3,300 feet below sea level.

MBARI researchers believe that the squid seen might be a "paralarva," a stage between hatching and adulthood. They also theorized it was a cockatoo squid, one of the 60 varieties of glass squid.

They described the creature as "especially charismatic" to SFGate and noted that, since they hadn't collected the animal, they couldn't be 100% sure of its identification. The needle-in-haystack find reaffirmed the benefits of MBARI's extensive research in shining a light on underwater ecosystems.

Glass squids are just as elusive to predators as they are to researchers, enabling them to evade attacks from below. Most of their skin is almost completely invisible, and their eyes can operate at a brightness level that supports camouflage.

The footage is just part of over 11 million scientific observations and 30,000 hours of video that MBARI has put together. 

All of the legwork in reviewing the tape after the January research cruise certainly paid off with a remarkable find.

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"The world is full of infinite beauty and mystery!" a commenter enthused on YouTube.

"Sooooo cute!!" another gushed.

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