Check out this plumps, squishy sea creature.
It's called a sea cucumber.
And while it may just look like a harmless slug,
it has a unique, albeit gross defense mechanism.
Do you know what's coming out of the sea cucumber?
Stick around to find out the answer later.
Sea cucumbers are more closely related
to a starfish than a cucumber,
and they're just as low on the food chain.
But the sea cucumber
has a secret weapon.
To protect itself from predators,
it shoots out a toxic deterrent out of its butt.
Just so we're clear.
Sea cucumbers aren't vegetable cucumbers.
They're invertebrates called echinoderms.
That's the same animal group containing starfish
and sea urchins.
They're found in almost all marine environments
throughout the world,
inhabiting both shallow and deep seas.
Adult sea cucumbers spend their lives
in the benthic zone, the sea floor.
But their larvae are planktonics,
which means they drift with the currents.
Go with the flow babies.
And these creatures come in all different shapes
and sizes.
About 1,250.
Depending on the species, they vary in size
from less than 2.5 centimeters
to over one point eight meters.
They're scavengers, so they suck up
whatever specks of food come their way.
Be it plankton, algae or waste particles.
As they lazily cruise the ocean floor.
It's easy to see why they are
such easy prey for predators like crabs and sea turtles.
But they have more fight in them than you might expect.
When faced with a predator.
They expose their skeletal hook like structures,
which make them difficult and unpleasant to eat.
Ouch.
OK, let's find out what in the world
that sea cucumber was shooting out earlier.
Did you guess that right?
Its last ditch effort is to squirt its toxic internal organs out
its anus toward the predator to confuse and deter it.
When it works,
the sea cucumber lives to see another day
and its internal organs eventually regenerate
with no harm done.
But that's not the only thing.
They use their anuses for.
Sea cucumbers, use their anuses
for breathing and defecating.
According to Smithsonian magazine, sea cucumbers
expel over 64,000 metric tons (70,000 tons) of excrement
in one coral reef each year.
That's the weight of five Eiffel Towers.
A oui oui or in this case, a poo poo.
Much like earthworms, they aerate the ocean floor
by sucking up sediment, eating some of it
and then spitting the rest out.
This releases beneficial elements like nitrogen,
ammonia and calcium carbonate.
That sounds like an excessive amount of feces.
But sea cucumbers play a significant role
in the health of coral reef ecosystems
as calcium carbonate is an essential component
for coral formation.
Unfortunately,
these underappreciated little bottom dwellers
are threatened due to overfishing,
and they're in high demand as a food delicacy.
In some countries, sea cucumbers are valued
at $80 per kilogram ($36 per pound).
Hopefully these sea cucumbers will stick around
to keep our oceans happy and healthy.
Shooting their organs out of their butts
and pooping a lot is what sea cucumbers do.
And that's what makes them Crazy Creatures.