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Plump, pink and vaguely porcine in appearance, this bizarre creature is a Scotoplane – more commonly known as a “Sea Pig”. With its squat little legs and translucent body, it may look like an exotic, alien piglet, but it’s actually a very common and numerous form of sea cucumber.
 
Sea Pigs live far beneath the waves on the bottom of nearly all the world’s oceans, but particularly on the abyssal plain in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, at depths of over 1,000 meters. 
 
Their comical legs are basically enlarged tubes that have taken on a leg-like appearance, and indeed they’re the only sea cucumbers in the world that walk on legs in this way. However rather than a muscular system, Sea Pigs use water cavities within their skin to inflate and deflate the legs, much like hydraulic pumps.
 
These little legs propel them all over the sea floor in search of food, but as nutrition is scarce 1,000 metres down, they’re forced to hoover up the mud and detritus that has drifted down from the surface far above and extract what organic particles they can from it. Rather like terrestrial pigs, they use their sense of smell to locate promising food sources, with whale corpses being an especially prized delicacy.
 
Due to the difficulty of studying creatures that live so far down, scientists still know very little about their ecology and behaviour, but unusually for sea cucumbers, they’re often found congregating in great numbers. Whether they’re actually social creatures remains unknown, but it could simply be that their sheer abundance means they’re naturally spotted in their hundreds and thousands in the same area.