4/18/2024 0 Comments Blue planet sea of life the deep![]() (Image credit: Kevin Raskoff © 1999 MBARI.) Fanciful gelatinous organisms like this one are far more plentiful in the deep sea than previously suspected. "But we didn't know that, because if you drag a net through deep water, any of these gelatinous animals are shredded they either turn into so much goo or pass through the net."Ī red lobate ctenophore. It turns out they account for a whopping 25 percent of the biomass in the deep. The deep ocean is a weird universe of jellyfish and their relations, sometimes forming chains many feet long, often lit by shimmering flickers of bioluminescence. "It's not until we started going down there that we realized, 'Holy cow! There's an astonishing number of gelatinous animals down here,'" Robison, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, said in an interview. They missed an entire class of creatures that appear to be one of the dominant life forms in the deep sea, a finding scientist Bruce Robison called "one of the biggest discoveries we've made in the last 10 years or so." Until the relatively recent development of manned submersibles and remotely operated seafaring robots, nets were one of the few tools available to scientists trying to sample life from the darkness of the deep.Īnd those nets missed more than just fast-moving animals like squid. "But in the water column, things move around."Īnd, Widder said, those things can outrun a researcher's trawling net. "Stuff that's on the bottom, some of it moves, but not very fast, and a lot of it is just stuck in one place," Vecchione said. This small ctenophore is sometimes called a 'sea gooseberry.' Unlike medusa (what most people think of as jellyfish), ctenophores have sticky tentacles that capture small animals and particles, but do not sting their prey. Within the last 10 years, two large squid species have been found, he said, "and there are other large things in the deep sea we've gotten glimpses of but have never caught, so we don't know what we're going to discover."īoth Vecchione and Widder study the biology of the open waters of the deep ocean, known to researchers as the water column a region even less explored than the ocean floor, and whose inhabitants are more difficult to find. "When they were first discovered, it was a complete surprise nobody knew they even existed," Vecchione told OurAmazingPlanet. Only dozens have ever been seen since they were discovered in the 1970s. ![]() Over the last several decades, scientists have found some bizarre and massive creatures dwelling in the deep, such as the megamouth shark, a filter feeder that grows up to 18 feet (5 meters) long. "There must be many animals, possibly large animals, down there that we don't know about," said Edith Widder, CEO and senior scientist at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association. Vecchione and other scientists who study the deep sea say one of their biggest challenges is trying to figure out what exactly lives down there.Īlthough the Census of Marine Life, a decade-long international study, uncovered more than 1,200 new species (excluding microbes) in the planet's oceans, the study also highlighted just how much humans still have to learn about the deep ocean in particular. ![]() To put that in context, the ocean's average depth is 13,120 feet (4,000 m), the height of many peaks in the Rockies and the Alps. In 2003 Vecchione descended aboard a Russian submersible to the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone, a gash in the mid-Atlantic seafloor that is 14,760 feet (4,500 meters) at its deepest. This animal was estimated to be 13 to 16 feet (4 to 5 m.) in length. Known as the bigfin squid, the creatures were only discovered about a decade ago, and much about them remains mysterious. A remotely operated vehicle (ROV) caught sight of this bizarre squid swimming placidly along 11,100 feet (3,380 m) down, off the coast of Oahu. ![]()
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