Sitting in darkness, deep below the sunlit surface, an iridescent nightmare awaits its prey. With precision and speed, it strikes and slices a passing fish clean in half with a set of jaws twice the width of its head. The armour-plated creature retreats into its hole, quarry in tow, to rejoin the bustling metropolis of animals living in a network of burrows in the mud.
This scene of a hunting bobbit worm is not one of science fiction, set on a far-flung planet. This creature lives within the seabed of the Earth’s continental shelf. This alien world, collectively the size of the North American continent, has been largely ignored.
