  A dead seal pup lies at the bottom of an icy Antarctic bay, shut off from the sunlit world by a thick ceiling of sea ice. At first glance, this final resting place seems drab and colorless, an expanse of encrusted stones and dim water. The ice permits only a dim illumination. Soon enough, splashes of color creep in from the peripherals. Multihued sea stars and brittle stars advance on the corpse, marching inch by inch on suckered limbs. Spiny sea urchins also heed the cadaver call, as do the nemertean worms that squirm their plump, sickly colored bodies toward the promise of sustenance.
It was a sight that astonished Life producer Neil Lucas, who traveled with the film crew to Antarctica in order to capture footage of the underwater feast.
"It amazed me when we got down there," Lucas said. "You don't expect it. You go down through a white tube, something like 6 feet [1.8 meters] of ice, you go down and all of a sudden this vast expanse of amazing colors just opens up in front of you."
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Watch "Nemertean Worms and Sea Stars"
ONE HUNDRED CRAWLING STOMACHS
Life moves at a sluggish pace in the frigid waters off Antarctica. The denizens of its icy depths grow slowly, but in doing so live longer and reach massive size. Such are the benefits of a decreased metabolism.
"They only have light for a few months of the year," Lucas said. "For the rest of the year, it's completely dark, and it's so cold they grow very, very slowly. Plus, there are no real predators down there, which eat things like the starfish and the nemertean worms, so they reach huge sizes — a lot bigger than they would in the tropics."
Compared to the bloated, ghastly hued worms and spiny urchins, the sea stars may seem the most aesthetically pleasing scavenger at the feast. According to Lucas, however, flipping one of the stars over reveals their less glamorous side.
"The starfish have this grotesque way of feeding," Lucas said. "It turns its stomach out through its mouth and pushes it on to the food. Then it emits these digestive juices, a little bit like the juices in our stomach, which dissolve the meat. Then they suck it all back in."
Using time-lapse technology, the
Life team sped up the footage 500 times in order to shed light on the movements of such slow-moving creatures. In the footage, the starfish appear to be pumping the flesh of the dead seal pup. In reality, they're pushing their regurgitated organs against the hide. It all makes for a rather lengthy feast — one that spans an entire summer. At the end, only bones will remain.
Continue: Conqueror Worms
