The stuff of dreams (夢幻食材!)”

A Facebook post from Ramen Boy토토사이트, a restaurant in a night market in Taiwan, went viral. This is because it featured a dish made with deep-sea crustaceans. And it became a box office hit as an overseas topic around the world.

The creature used as an ingredient for human food is Batinomus (Giant isopod). It lives in the ocean deep enough to be seen in aquariums and in real life. It looks like an alien creature, but it plays an important role in the ecosystem. They clean up the ocean by eating dead fish and squid. That’s why they’re sometimes called “ocean cleaners.

[Captured from the sideline555 YouTube channel].

Because they’re deep-sea creatures, we still don’t know the full extent of their existence. From its population to its species to its impact on the marine ecosystem, there are still more questions than answers. And before we can answer them all, humans are starting to eat it.

[Source restaurant’s official Facebook page]

[Source restaurant official Facebook]

“It’s simple to cook. Remove the intestines, steam it in a steamer, and it tastes like lobster. The whole thing is surprisingly sweet, and it’s really worth eating!”

Recently, the Taiwanese restaurant posted a post like this, along with more than 20 photos of the batinomus dish. The photos are meant to show how advanced (?) the dish is. “We finally got our dream ingredient,” the restaurant said, emphasizing that “it lives in dark and deep waters between 170 meters and 2140 meters, and this time we caught it near the Dongsha Islands.”

[Source restaurant’s official Facebook page].

A bowl costs 14.8 million won (about 64,000 won), and the restaurant said it will only sell to regular customers due to limited availability.

The creature is not found in Korean waters. It lives in the deep waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans. However, we still don’t know the exact distribution area. It is likely that there are species that are still unknown to humans.

They’ve intrigued humans since they were first discovered because of their unique appearance. The larger species can reach 50 centimeters in length.

[Captured from the LUMCON YouTube channel].

It’s called the “scavenger of the sea” because of what we know about its behavior so far. They are carnivorous and feed mainly on dead whales, fish, and squid. In the past, videos of them eating dead crocodiles in the depths of the ocean have caused quite a stir.

The more you know about them, the more unique they are. Despite their voracious appetite, they have been known to survive for up to five years without food.

In fact, around 2010, an aquarium in Japan had a problem when they couldn’t get them to eat for four years, despite all their efforts. In an interview, the aquarium said, “They only pretend to eat when we feed them, but they don’t eat. We tried to find the optimal temperature for them, but it didn’t make a difference.”

So we still don’t know them.

Should we eat deep-sea creatures, should we brag that they taste like lobster, and who would have thought that humans would boil ramen with deep-sea creatures?

Ali Tabrizi, director of the marine ecosystem documentary Sea Spiracies, recently attended the 3rd H.eco Forum in Seoul, Korea, and insisted that there is a simple and obvious solution to the destruction of marine ecosystems. “The best thing we can do is just leave the ocean alone. The ocean can recover on its own.”