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Today we meet the Sea Pig, also known as the Wanderer in the Darkness.

Far below the reach of any sunlight, on the soft, muddy floor of the deep ocean, a small, pale creature slowly makes its way across the seafloor.

At first glance it looks almost comical — a plump, rounded body the color of soft pink or translucent white, with several pairs of stubby, leg-like appendages sticking out from its sides. Near the front, a couple of longer projections rise up like antennae or a snout. If you saw a picture of it without knowing what it was, you might think someone had drawn a cartoon pig and dropped it onto the ocean floor.

But this is no pig.

This is a sea cucumber — a member of the genus Scotoplanes. The name comes from two ancient Greek words: skotos, meaning darkness, and planes, meaning wanderer. So its very name means “wanderer in the darkness.”

And that name could not be more accurate.

Sea pigs live in one of the most extreme environments on Earth. Most are found between one thousand and six thousand meters deep — that’s from a little over half a mile to nearly four miles beneath the ocean surface. Some have even been recorded in the hadal zone, the ultra-deep trenches that plunge even farther. At those depths the water pressure is crushing — hundreds of times greater than the pressure we feel at sea level. The temperature hovers just above freezing. And the darkness is absolute. No ray of sunlight has ever reached the places where sea pigs live.

Yet they are perfectly at home there.

Unlike most sea cucumbers that creep along on rows of tiny tube feet, sea pigs have developed enlarged, leg-like tube feet. These are not rigid bones. They are hydraulic. The animal fills them with seawater, inflates them, and uses them to push against the soft sediment. Then it deflates them and repeats the process. In this way the sea pig slowly “walks” across the abyssal plain. The longer projections near its head are also modified tube feet. Scientists believe they serve a sensory purpose — helping the animal detect chemical trails in the water so it can find food in a world without eyes.

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