Slashdot Mirror
New Deep Ocean Creatures
An anonymous reader writes "NORFANZ was a recent expedition that went really deep into the ocean in the search for new species that live in the largely unchartered waters of the Tasman Sea. Check out the site and some very cool pics."
closely resembles one of the 'sea monsters' that lived in/near The Core in Phantom Menace. Shame it didn't eat Jar Jar....
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
I have a feeling someone isn't going to be very happy when they get to work this morning.
If you like this stuff, read this recent news story:
Giant sea specimen baffles scientists
Nothin' better than new beasts. And sea-beasts are the most interesting beasts of all!
How do they taste?
Did you see the size of that? I'm just imagining how that would taste dipped in clarified garlic butter right now...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
From the page: "Before our cruise, these were the only two records of this rare fish in the world. Its rarity lead to it being formally recognised as threatened. In one short trawl at around 90 m deep near Ball's Pyramid, we collected three specimens and excellent fresh photographs taken by Kerryn Parkinson."
With only two records of a fish in existance, you then "collect" three specimens to keep?
What happens if you never see them again?
So the Tasmanian sea doesn't lease itself out too much?
I'm thinking that should be uncharted, as in no charts have been drawn up mapping it...
There's some funky stuff going on down there. Like the dating habits of the Humpback Anglerfish.
"For me, this bizarre fish (the size of a tennis ball) is one of the most fascinating creatures in the deep sea. It has it all, its black, has big savage teeth, little nasty pin eyes, a big flabby stomach ready to fit in anything it can catch (irrelevant of size) and a rod lure off the top of its head with a glowing tip to coax in stupid prey. It doesnt stop there: its flesh is watery, its bones are very light (barely coated by a thin layer of calcium carbonate) and it can barely swim (theres not much of a tail). This animal just hangs mid-water waving its little lure and waiting to chomp. And this is only what the female looks like! The male is completely different. Hes very small and looks like a black jellybean with fins. He has no lure, has big eyes, huge nostrils and a fairly small mouth with curved hooked teeth. His body is made of strong red muscle for swimming long distances. Why the difference? Shes looking for food, hes looking for her. She releases anglerfish-type perfumes into the water and he spends all his time swimming around looking and smelling for her. When he eventually finds her (in the dark), he latches on to her side (with his hooked teeth) and drinks her food-rich blood in return for producing the sperm she needs when it comes time to release her eggs."
Or the Mossish ( Caulophryne jordani )
"Like other anglerfishes, males are very different. They are small and have simple fins. In this species, the male latches on to the female and doesn't let go. Their skin fuses and he stays as a permanent pimple with eyes, drinking blood and making sperm."
Not only do I not like seafood, but looking at underwater life just turns my stomach.
The fish don't bother me, but the crabs and other oddball forms are just too weird. Everything is either spiny or gooey.
Blech!!!
...I heard about this over the weekend. Giant something or other... Looks like it has been one hell of a week to be a marine biologist, eh?
+ G to tha Izzo, A to tha Tizee, Talking Giz-oat, Ya'll Bettah Feel Me... +
I see they discovered the goblin shrimp, but did they discover this species
"Beware the squirrels"
"How do they taste?"
Check out some of the older fish determination guides: some of them actually have information on the tastiness listed with each fish. These won't be in the guides though.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Incredible! Finally, an authentic photograph of Cowboy Neal!
I think one of the reasons why these creatures look so weird is that they may have had the most time of every type of creature to evolve. The deep sea is not affected by ice ages and warm periods that have a large influence on the surface of the planet, so the enviromnent in which these creatures evolved may have been virtually undisturbed for many millions of years.
-- Cheers!
"To seek out new life and new civilisations...and grill them with a knob of butter and a sprig of parsley. Mmmmmm."
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
You just never know...
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Firstly they have wonky eyes, the left eye is always much larger than the right.
If they're going to throw technical jargon like that at us, I'll be completely lost.
Especially the last one, known as the Jewel Squid. This just boggles my mind. And I quote:
It's almost difficult to believe that such a creature exists, much less was the product of random gene bit-flips over millions of years. Not that evolution isn't a reasonable theory (one which I happen to believe) but this is one of those crazy outcomes that seems so difficult to accept.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
to own a "coffinfish", a species very close in look and character can be had easily. The marine fish is known as a "frogfish" and are highly interesting creatures to keep in a dedicated reef-tank.
Just FYI
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
It really surprises me how many people think of the world's water simply as "The Ocean", like it's one homogeneous thing that has the same contents everywhere. I'd expect that it would be even more varied than surface life, since different pressures, temperatures, currents, light levels, seafloor materials, salinity, and other fluid contents would vary greatly from location to location, and since depth allows for many ranges of habitats (and life forms can float at a certain depth easier than they can equivalently in air) we'd have more to look at than we could possibly ever figure out entirely. I'd think that we'd be tripping over new life forms every time we looked anywhere intently or anywhere we hadn't gone before.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
>===@ (Angler)
|==\=> (Glowing Antenna Thingy)
8==============> (errrr...)
Honk if you're horny.
I read somewhere that the big blob that washed up on the coast of Chile was one of Pamela Anderson's old implants.
Read any good sonnets lately?
There's a popular tourist/holiday spot up north in NZ called the Bay of Islands. One of the most popular towns is Paihia. There's a small aquarium on the main strip, which contains only sea creatures that were found in the local region.
My wife and I went in there one day, and as we walked through the front door a very nice chap introduced himself, said he was the owner, and to feel free to ask him any questions we might have. We started walking around, and soon decided we wanted some more information about a particular fish, so asked him, and he obligingly answered our question. He then followed up by telling us, "By the way, that fish is also quite tasty to eat. You want to cook him up with just a splash of lemon juice, and he'll be beautiful". He then started pointing out other fish in that tank, telling us which were no good to eat and exactly how to cook the ones which were good to eat.
That guy very kindly gave us a full guided tour of the whole aquarium (it was a slow day) -- including his own personal cooking suggestions for every single tank in the place.
of reading this article while eating my lunch
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
I'm reading every post with a french accent.
The BBC had this story a week or two ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3017078.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3034520.stm
I didn't see the picture of the fangtooth on the link provided in the story above so wanted to share. Perhaps I just missed it? A couple of the other pics are different too I think.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I was thinking the same thing. I saw a bunch of guys showing the "things" they killed.
I would have much rather seen images of them in their habitat. Creatures from the deep sea just do not look the same dead and surfaced. They're flat, discolored, etc... have you ever seen a squid laying on the floor of a boat? It's jelly body look like a blob, not the magnificant creature it "was" swimming in it's habitat, so I'm not sure why showing us images of dead deep sea creatures was the preferred method of display here. I'm sure there were some great underwater shots of the same creatures...right?
I watch those deep sea exploration shows and they will find 2-3 new species of sea creature every dive. They say that the deep sea has more species of animals undiscovered than all known species to date, terrestrial life included. We know more about space, and the planets in the solar system than we do about life in the deep sea.
It's all very cool stuff.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Spongebob Squarepants
In the Pacific Spookfish caption it says:
"In the USA it is known as a Long-nosed Chimaera while in Europe they use the common name Cyrano Chimaera, named after the fictional French character Cyrano de Bergerac, who had a very long nose"
Savien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) is not a fictional character.
I emailed this nitpick in to the website, with a few details of de Bergerac's biography. Perhaps it will be fixed anon.
I know I've seen him somewhere... Isn't PHOTO 10 a spokesman for SCO?
I want to die in my sleep, like my dear old great-grandad... not like all the screaming wusses in the car he hit!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Take a look at this friendly little sample and ask yourself where H.R.Giger really got his inspiration for our friends, the aliens, in the Aliens movies series.
No, this is not about the large piece of blubber that they found on the beach.
This article has pictures and a video of a very cool new large species of squid. It seems to fly through the water with wings, and has cool alien-like arms coming off the rear of it.
Amazing that is has been spotted in four different oceans, but no one has seen it before. It says a lot about how much we do not know about the oceans.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
For example, the formerly plentiful Patagonian and Antarctic Toothfishes (known in the restaurant trade as "Chilean Sea Bass" despite being amazingly ugly deep-sea dwellers) are well on their way to being fished to extinction.
Like many large fish, they have a long reproductive cycle, and thus are easily driven to extinction by modern fishing methods. Not that the fishing industry as a whole isn't fishing pretty much everything to commercial extinction, but they can do it a lot faster to species that take a long time to become reproductive adults.
The Discovery Channel Website doesn't indicate that these will air again anytime in the near future. You will also note that the Discovery Channel's web strategy is severely lacking because there is no way to have them notify you when it is coming on again. Or are they just being obscure because they reap more profits from DVD sales?
But I digress, this series kicks ass. It doesn't focus solely on the deep-sea critters, but rather casts a wide net. If you saw this show and were not completely freaked out by the presence of crazy brine pools at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, you aren't very curious about the world you live on.
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
Is it just me, or does the Anemone Hermit Crab shown in the second picture on this page look rather like an immature form of the Alien Face Hugger? Obviously H. R. Giger is a Tasmanian marine biologist in his spare time...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
--I would love to see photographs of these animals underwater as much as the next fellow, but it doesnt sound as if they are equipped with anything but trawling equipment. From what I gathered of the article their camera merely rides on a trawl line and records what is more or less beneath it. Also consider that with collected specimens you are able to obtain much data, including a clear idea of how the creature looks, that isn't reasonably possible taking photographs in pitch blackness at 1500 meters
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
"When the squid is hanging at a 45 angle, all the light organs aim down and produce just enough light to cancel out the silhouette of the squid against the weak light from the surface above. They can even adjust the lights for different depths or time of day."
Scroll down for the picture of a Jewel Squid.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I'd say the odds are against us.
I used to know a guy who lived in Guam who told me about some of the scary stuff locals would find in trawlers. Most were tiny fish, but a few were big enough to give a trout a run for its money. One of the stories he used to tell me:
And now, neither will I. He also said some people he grew up with caught a deep sea ribbon fish (oarfish?) that was over 40 feet long. He said he didn't care what anyone said, that thing was a sea serpent if he ever saw one.In other news, scientists have discovered that, with low enough light levels, green, blue, pink, white, and mauve all look black! The scientists involved are currently waiting for a government grant to test such properties on the elusive plaid.
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" - Vroomfondel, H2G2
I'm getting a lot of press today!
-- No Comment
I recently saw in Popular Science I believe scientists who were going to use computer simulations to show people what the ocean looked like off of San Fran 100 years ago versus today (100 is what I remember). Just one tiny picture was all I needed to see.
Overfishing is a serious problem. I don't think people really understand how few of the popular fish are left out there.
Are we going to end up harvesting plankton a la SOylent Green?
It's not a question of wether Nature can bounce back, she can, and rather quickly, but the fishing has to stop for a bit. Unfortunately shortsighted people will continue to push for more fishing lanes.
The flip side of this is that fishermen have to eat and survive too. It's not as simple as telling them they can just up and get a job in an office.
So my question is, before I goto google for a bit, does anyone have any links to helpful sources for the preservation of our Oceans? It has to be done, and there has to be some way of keeping the fishermen paid. Does it require government subsidies? Perhaps, they'll step in way before a company offers to pay fishermen to stop fishing.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Sea Bass extinction? That's easy to avoid... just strap some freakin' "lasers" to their heads.