Tunicates, an animal that is stalk like in structure and looks like glass tulips.
Sydney, Australia (AP) - Australian experts taking part in an international program to take a census of marine life in the ocean at the far south of the world collected specimens from up to 6,500 feet beneath the surface, and said many may never have been seen before.
Some of the animals far under the sea grow to unusually large sizes, a phenomenon called gigantism.
"Gigantism is very common in Antarctic waters," Martin Riddle, the Australian Antarctic Division scientist who led the expedition, said. "We have collected huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates."
Among the bizarre-looking creatures the scientists spotted were tunicates, plankton-eating animals that resemble slender glass structures up to a yard tall "standing in fields like poppies," Riddle said.
Other animals were equally baffling. "They had fins in various places, they had funny dangly bits around their mouths," Riddle told reporters. "They were all bottom dwellers so they were all evolved in different ways to live down on the sea bed in the dark. So many of them had very large eyes - very strange looking fish."
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