Range: Oceans worldwide Habitat: Ocean depths Size: About 5 inches (12.7cm) long Diet: Marine snow, microbes, and whale carcasses Threats: Unknown Life span: Unknown

Transcript:

Today on Animal Fact Files we’re going to be talking about sea pigs. If you like learning facts about animals then subscribe to this channel so you can stay up to date on all the new content.

Sea pigs are a kind of sea cucumber that belong to the genus Scotoplanes. While there are multiple species in this genus we’ll be focusing mainly on the globosa species in this episode mostly because they’re the most iconic and they have the coolest name. Globosa. These plump, pink creatures live in the depths of the ocean and together with the other deep-sea dwelling sea cucumbers make up upwards of 95% of the total weight of animals on the seafloor. That’s a lot of piggies.

Overall not much is known about sea pigs because they’re not exactly easy to study. For one, they’re extremely fragile and since one of the only ways to get them up from them bottom of the ocean is by trawling them with a net a lot of specimens will just kind of disintegrate when they’re caught. Poor little blobs.

Plus, because they live at depths anywhere from half a mile to more than three and a half miles (1000 to 6000 meters) below the ocean’s surface, they’ve evolved to live in conditions that are extremely difficult to replicate on the surface. Down there it’s completely void of light, the temperature typically hovers right around freezing and the water pressure is so great it would make a styrofoam cup shrink to less than half its size. While we have been able to keep a few sea pigs on the surface it was never for long stints of time and the cost was really high. Sorry to dash the hopes of anyone out there wanting to own a sea pig. On the plus side, since they’ve become more popular as a species, you can get toys of them (though why they have eyes is beyond me…).

Sea pigs possibly got their name for two reasons. One is because they generally look somewhat porcine possessing a pinkish toned body and short, stumpy legs. Another could also be based on their mud-sifting eating habits. Either way, you wouldn’t want to take a bite out of one of these piggies. They have toxic chemicals in their skin making them highly unpalatable. Besides, how could you eat such an adorable thing?

They are usually about 5 inches long (12.7 centimeters) and could probably easily fit into the palm of your hand. They’re mostly made of water so I wonder if it would be anything like holding a water balloon. Their “legs” (which are really called tube feet) come in pairs of usually 5 to 7 with the bottom “legs” used for locomotion. I say bottom because the antenna looking things on top of them are actually feet as well, though they’re not used for walking. These are more like nose… feet. It’s believed that these are used as a sensory organ, like a nose, that aides in finding food that’s less than 100 days old, since they prefer it fresh.

And what they eat you might find kind of gross. Marine snow is an amalgamation of plankton debris, dead animal particles and poop. This is part of the main portion of a sea pigs’ diet. They also eat microbes on the seafloor, though probably their favorite meal is dead whale. While up until this point I can’t remember thinking to myself, “I wonder what happens when a whale dies,” now I have a pretty good idea. Their bodies will sink to the bottom of the ocean and get gobbled up by sea pigs (among other species). Ahh… the circle of life…

Something that’s pretty cool is that when sea pigs find a large deposit of food, such as a whale carcass, they will gather in droves to that spot. I’m talking like hundreds of sea pigs all in one spot. And when they do that, it’s been observed that they will all face in the same direction. They do this so that they’re facing the prevailing current thus giving them more opportunity to detect the best spot for food, though I feel like this could be the premise for some alien cult movie or something.

Sea pig dietary habits are actually pretty important. They’ve been described as the earthworms of the sea and if you want to know more about what that statement might mean, we have a video for that! While they forage through the soil and consume oxygen eating microbes then end up releasing oxygen through their waste making the sediment better for tons of small animals living on the seafloor, or, you know, the other 5%.

Unlike some other sea cucumbers, they don’t have fish who frequently like to live in their butt nor do they expel all their organs as a defense mechanism for predators, though we’ll have to get back to that in another episode. In reality, we’re not completely sure if sea pigs even have any predators, though we do know that they are hosts to parasites, one being a snail that burrows into their body and feeds on them internally and a tiny crustacean that bores holes into them and eats their organs. Nope. Just nope.

Sadly, we also don’t have much information on how they reproduce or even how long they can live, though I guess that means, for now, we can pretend they’re all thousands of years old and planning their world invasion or, you know, how to eat a shark.

For more facts on sea pigs you can check out the links in the description. Let us know in the comments what animal you’d like to learn about next. As always, thank you for watching and be sure to give a thumbs up for more Animal Fact Files.