Horrible Deep Sea Thread

Well, I'm bored, I think it's been long enough time since I've done this, and didn't Pathfinder announce an ocean-themed splatbook recently or something? Good enough excuse, I say.

I'll be dumping my folder of weird sea creatures (mostly actual ones, because let's face it, they tend to be weirder than the stuff most artists can think of) while also dumping mostly factual information about horrible deep sea things at people. Also collecting any cool pictures people might post that I still haven't got in my folder.

While oceanic games tend to be a pain in the ass, many horrible deep sea things look freaky enough to make into horrible eldritch things, so they might serve as inspiration for monsters in non-oceanic games. Also raise awareness of marine life and all that.

Now, does anybody have a particular subject they'd want me to start with? Else I just post whatever comes to mind.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needlefish#Danger_to_humans
sportfishingmag.com/news/needlefish-attacks-russian-tourist-and-paralyzes-her
youtu.be/_y4DbZivHCY
youtube.com/watch?v=KYLWlERyNIc
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

>horrible
NO BULLY

Start with tentacle things.

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.

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.

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

>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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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."

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.

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.

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.

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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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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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.
sportfishingmag.com/news/needlefish-attacks-russian-tourist-and-paralyzes-her

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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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That "sea-serpent" has fucking legs.

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

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Ok - what the everloving fuck is that?

google says 'weird-looking starfish'

Poor sea-pig.
youtu.be/_y4DbZivHCY

The focal point of my nightmares for the foreseeable future.

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

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.

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.

chosin unded lite de fire nd sugseed lerd gwin

>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!.

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

what is that, a fucking powerup?

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

What's going on in this video

I think I know but I am probably wrong

You don't recognise the fearsome hadouken fish?

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?

good thing it's 'cryptozoological' and not real.

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

That is a smug fucking sea-baggie.

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

yeah, they have improved grab and swallow whole.

Sorry user 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.

>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.

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 user 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.

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.

> "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.

jesus fucking christ I hate the ocean

#6 looks terrifyingly human

oh hai

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?

youtube.com/watch?v=KYLWlERyNIc

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.

>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

Awesome!

What is this?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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?

are there any that wouldn't?

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.

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.

Holy shit. Literally just like in my japanese porn.

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.

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Top left looks like a nerd

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.