Nice hat, buddy. A bull elephant seal wears a tracking tag glued to its fur. (LiveScience)A Ukrainian teenager is the toast of marine researchers half a world away after apparently witnessing something scientists have never seen an elephant seal devouring a slimy hagfish almost 3,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. <\/p>\n
Kirill Dudko, a 14-year-old deep-sea biology nut, lives in the city of Donetsk. He was monitoring a live stream of undersea cameras when he spotted the seal in Barkley Canyon, off the west coast of Vancouver Island, making a meal of the unappetizing hagfish. It's thought to be shunned by predators because of the slimy mucus they exude. The fish, sometimes called slime eels, have existed largely unchanged for 300 million years. <\/p>\n
But Dudko spotted the nose of an elephant seal slurping up the hagfish like a fugitive piece of fettuccine. <\/p>\n
In a YouTube video of the Jan. 12 incident, Steven Mihaly, a staff scientist with Ocean Networks Canada, said the images confirmed for the first time speculation on how deep an elephant seal could dive. <\/p>\n
Dudko emailed Neptune Canada, which links the 800-kilometre network of cameras and instruments to the Internet for Ocean Networks, based at the University of Victoria. <\/p>\n
[Related: Seals death sentence in Quebec halted, thanks to outcry from animal lovers ] <\/p>\n
Monday morning we had an email from him saying, I saw something strange and weird. Some monster just ate a fish in front of me. What was it? And that sent all of us into a bit of a flurry to back this up,\" said associate director Kim Juniper. <\/p>\n
It was like a horror film, the biology enthusiast wrote in his email, according to the Victoria Times Colonist. This creature wasnt like a fish and I realized it was a mammal because of the nose and moustache. <\/p>\n
In a separate email to the Times Colonist, Dudko said he was puzzled because he didn't think any mammal except a whale could dive so deep. <\/p>\n
In an interview with CBC News, Kiril's mother, Svetlana, said she was very proud of her son. <\/p>\n
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\nTeen marine-biology buff makes discovery via undersea webcam off B.C. coast<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"