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First Look At the Animals of the New Hebrides Trench

Posted by samzenpus on from the under-the-sea dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have released pictures of the animals they've found in the New Hebrides Trench, more than 7,000m down. 'The team used an unmanned lander fitted with cameras to film the deep-sea creatures. The scientists said the ecology of this trench differed with other regions of the deep that had been studied. "We're starting to find out that what happens at one trench doesn't necessarily represent what happens in all the trenches," said Dr Alan Jamieson, from Oceanlab at the University of Aberdeen, UK, who carried out the expedition with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand.'"

9 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cliche by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 2

    New Hebrides - I was expecting a Melanesian relative of Nessie.

  2. Re:Cliche by Razgorov+Prikazka · · Score: 2, Funny

    No Spongebob either :-(

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    rm -rf --no-preserve-root / ...and let /dev/null sort them out...
  3. Re:Atmospheric pressure by expatriot · · Score: 4, Informative

    The pressure inside equals the pressure outside (which is true for us also). They are not hollow glass spheres.

    The pressure does change chemistry as reactions are affected by temperature and pressure.

  4. Really? by argStyopa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "...We're starting to find out that what happens at one trench doesn't necessarily represent what happens in all the trenches..."

    When speciation is happening in adjacent subway tunnels in the London Underground over as short a span as 100 years, I think it's pretty certain that deep-sea trenches separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles will evolve rather dramatically differently?

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    -Styopa
    1. Re:Really? by cusco · · Score: 2

      Citation needed. I mean really, that's incredibly cool. If you're talking about the molestus mosquito, the Wikipedia entry seems self-contradictory in places and unclear how the thing is spreading across the ocean to other subway systems.

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      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
    2. Re:Really? by interkin3tic · · Score: 2

      "Finding out" is different than "predicted." It's all well and good to assume that what happens in one trench is not going to be true in other trenches, given the isolation, but you don't really know unless you go to the other trenches.

      Also, skimming the wiki article on the london subway mosquitoes you might be referring to, it looks more like the mosquitoes diverged by taking advantage of a new niche, not reproductive isolation. They evolved because it's fairly warm year round, there are people in them, and few predators. It mentions that they have been found in subway systems throughout the world. If the creatures in one trench have a range of above a trench, a reasonable hypothesis would be that they fill all trenches as they're one of the few things that can live there, and that most trenches would be filled with similar life.

    3. Re:Really? by JoeMerchant · · Score: 2

      In the absence of data, science tends to assume that the observations in hand also apply to places not observed yet. When it comes true, everybody cheers. The rest of the time, there's a progression of "that's strange... I don't believe you - prove it!... Hmmm, we need a grant to study this."

      There should be a "meta-science of the unknown" to explain how much we don't know, based on the variability of our existing observations - how likely we are to find new and surprising things, based on how often our existing knowledge base has been surprised in the past. Sort of how they choose space exploration missions, but certainly it can be applied to many under-explored areas on Earth, too.

    4. Re:Really? by argStyopa · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That is what I was thinking of when I made the comment, cf http://www.nature.com/hdy/jour...
      http://ncse.com/files/pub/evol...

      I thought the science was reasonably settled on this, apparently /. commenters beg to differ. :)

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      -Styopa
  5. Re:Atmospheric pressure by JoeMerchant · · Score: 2

    Just don't travel up and down the water column with trapped gas and you'll be fine.

    Oh, you breathe air? Well, that presents extra challenges.

    So much solar energy gets converted to chemical energy and then falls to the bottom of the ocean - it was more or less inevitable that surface life would evolve and exploit it somehow.