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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."
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
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."
Incredible! Finally, an authentic photograph of Cowboy Neal!
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.
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?
Photophores originated from colonies of phosphorent bacteria that were living in the fish. This eventually evolved into a differentiated tissue that was light-emitting.
The optical mechanism of these photophores can be quite complex too - it is expensive (metabolically) to turn the light on and off so iris-like shutters have evolved for some species...
I'm reading every post with a french accent.
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
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.
"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.