Antarctic Sea Spider

To tell you the truth, this creature sort of flips me out.

It's an Antarctican sea spider, it has a proboscis mouth (such as a housefly does) which it uses to suck the juices from sponges and sea slugs, and it lives on the ocean floor between 6000 to 7000 metres (!) beneath the ocean's surface. That's over three miles down! That ain't exactly the most bright-lighted place in the world for this sort of creature to be crawling around sucking the vital juices from soft and squishy living things.

And they're big enough to be creepy, most about two and half feet across!

Ohmigod, can you imagine being a dive specialist three miles down below the Antartic Ocean (temp −2 °C), pitch black except for your own light, and you step and crunch on one of these things, and then look down and start to see a bunch of them crawling around you? Gasp swoon faint.

Just to balance things out a little, the Antartic Ocean is also home to the largest and most song-singingest whales alive, the blue whale. So...

...I guess, as far as blood-sucking spider creatures go, it actually is nicely packaged. I mean, orange? Why orange? What set of circumstances inspired that evolutionary leap?

Link via reddit.