An incredible video has gone viral on social media, which shows a diver coming face-to-face with a squid's gigantic egg sac while swimming underwater; jam-packed with thousands of teeming baby squid.
The video was filmed off the coast of Norway by a trio of GoPro-wielding divers, working from the research vessel REV Ocean. The mesmerizing footage shows a diver carefully circling a colossal gelatinous blob - a squid's egg sac that was almost as big as an adult human being.
On October 6, diver Ronald Raasch shared the clip of the enormous blob to social media, where it quickly went viral.
Watch the astonishing footage of this underwater encounter right here:The divers spotted the egg sac while exploring a submerged World War II shipwreck in Ørstafjorden; approximately about 650 feet (200 meters) away from the coast, at a depth of around 55 feet. Raasch didn't know what the mass was, and he later described the blob as a "blekksprutgeleball", a phrase which literally translates to: "squid gel ball" in Norwegian.
This isn't the first such gelatinous mass to have been spotted underwater by divers in recent weeks. According to a recent report by Live Science, other blobs have been spotted in Spain, France, and Italy over the past 30 years. The jelly-like masses were previously so delicate that they were difficult to retrieve samples from for testing without bursting them.
The Live Science report adds that when a sample was successfully taken from one blob found in the Mediterranean in 2017, DNA analysis confirmed that it was an egg sac from a southern shortfin squid (Illex coindetii).
According to SeaLifeBase, an internationally managed database of marine life, shortfin squid eggs measure approximately 0.07 inches (0.2 centimeters) in diameter on average when the embryo is ready to hatch. Females shortfin squid can produce between 50,000 and 200,000 eggs.
