Discovery, a remote operated vehicle (ROV) aboard China's research vessel¹ KEXUE (Science), captured two rare deep-water sea slugs in western Pacific Ocean in a recent dive.

 

中国科学号考察船上的发现号水下机器人最近在西太平洋发现了两种罕见的深水海兔。
 

 

Sea slugs are hardly seen in deep-water (deeper than 200 meters), but Discovery gathered the two at the depth of 970 meters, according to Xu Kuidong, chief scientist aboard the vessel and a researcher of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

 

The two sea slugs, with white bodies and pairs of bronze tentacles² on pink heads, are about 5 cm long and 2 cm wide in the ocean, but they curled up after being taken to the vessel.

 

With varying levels of resemblance to terrestrial slugs, sea slugs actually belong to the family of snails³, or marine⁴ gastropod mollusks, and have lost their shells over evolutionary⁵ time.

 

There are about 3,000 species of sea slugs in the world and most of them are found in shallow water of tropical zones.

 

Eight species were discovered in the deep-water of northeastern Pacific Ocean, and none has been reported in the deep-water of western Pacific Ocean before.

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