SCIENCE LAB. SQUARE : A BEAUTIFUL SQUID

'' First sighting of Antarctic marvel '' : The deep-sea environs of Earth's poles are home to mysterious ocean creatures : giant sea spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, phantom jellyfish.

Finding and identifying these animals can be hard, however, some are known only because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the bellies of seabirds.

But on Christmas Day last year, the crew of the R/V Falkor [ Too ], the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel, spotted a creature never before seen alive.

In the Powell Basin region, in the feed from a remotely operated submersible, the team spotted an  Antarctic gonate squid, a rare species of cephalopod, three feet long [ about a meter ] and releasing a green cloud of ink.

'' It was a beautiful squid,'' said Andrew Thurber, a deep-sea researcher at the University of California,  Santa Barbara, who was aboard.

'' You see beauty all the time in the deep ocean, and this was just one classic example of it.''

No Antarctic gonate squid had ever been seen alive before, as far as the team was aware.

They recorded it in video, capturing the creature's red coloration and white spots.

The World Students Society thanks Alexa Robles Gil.