THE SKELETON PANDA SEA SQUIRT

Several years ago, scuba divers were exploring coral reefs around Kumejima Island in Japan's Ryukyu archipelago when they saw what looked like a graveyard of tiny panda skeletons.

- NAOHIRO HASEGAWA AND HIROSHI KAJIHARA

Well, not exactly skeletons — more like skeletons with the living heads of pandas still attached.

These things are, at most, around 2cm (3/4in) long — about the length of a fingernail. At one end, there's a white ‘head’ with a black nose spot and two black panda-like eye patches. Visible through the transparent body is a stack of white horizontal lines, which look like bony ribs. There's even a black spot lower down that could be a tail. All very strange.

The divers recognised these skeleton creatures were a type of ascidian, also known as sea squirts. When photographs appeared on social media, people gave them the nickname gaikotsu-panda-hoya, Japanese for ‘panda skeleton sea squirt’.