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The first signs that life can exist in the deepest seas were nets full of mangled goo. The Challenger Expedition, an around-the-world oceanographic study led by Scottish naturalist Charles Wyville Thomson in the 1870s, trawled as deep as 26,000 feet and pulled up more than 4,000 unknown species. The strange creatures, many of which were gelatinous and didn't survive the trip to the surface, overturned the scientific wisdom of the time, which held—reasonably enough—that nothing could survive in a world without light, at temperatures just above freezing and at crushing pressures. It's still hard to believe.
Since then, people have explored the deep ocean—the region below about 650 feet—from inside tethered metal balls called bathyspheres and modern mobile submersibles, and they've sent down remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) equipped with cameras. The deep sea is the largest ecosystem on earth, plunging to more than 37,000 feet below sea level at the Marianas Trench in the Pacific. It accounts for 85 percent of the space where life can exist and holds an estimated ten million or more species. "But we're still trying to figure out what's out there," says marine scientist Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
A new book, The Deep (The University of Chicago Press), by French documentary film producer Claire Nouvian, may be the most comprehensive look at this mysterious world that we surface dwellers will get for a long time. The more than 200 photographs—most taken by scientists from submersibles and ROVs, some shot for the book—show just how head-shakingly bizarre life can be. The scientists who discovered the creatures were apparently as amused as we are, giving them names such as gulper eel, droopy sea pen, squarenose helmetfish, ping-pong tree sponge, Gorgon's head and googly-eyed glass squid.
Nouvian herself made two dives in a submersible, to 3,200 feet. The first thing she noticed, she says, was that "it's very slow. You can tell that all their laws are different." Given the cold, the dark and the scarcity of food, animals tend to be "sit-and-wait predators," floating around and taking what comes their way rather than burning energy to pursue and attack.
The main source of food in the deep is "marine snow," flakes of dead things and fecal matter that drift down from the bright ocean. Sometimes entire feasts fall to the seafloor: a few years ago, oceanographers discovered several species of snails and worms that dine on dead whales. Other deep-sea food webs are fueled by hydrothermal vents, cracks in the ocean floor where seawater mixes with magma and erupts in hot, sulfur-rich plumes. Microbes have evolved the ability to convert chemicals from these vents into energy—a way of life that was unknown before 1977.
There's little or no sunlight in the deep, but most animals "bioluminesce," flashing like fireflies. They turn on headlights to see food or attract mates; anglerfish dangle wormlike glowing appendages to lure prey. Some deep-sea squid shoot a cloud of bioluminescence to distract predators, much as upper-ocean squid squirt black ink. Jellyfish, often transparent in the oceans above, tend to be dark, which shields them from attention while their swallowed prey bioluminesces in its death throes. Down below, says Nouvian, the bioluminescence—some in short flashes, some in shimmering curtains, some hopping about like grasshoppers—"is more dramatic than the most dramatic sky with shooting stars."
The drama of discovery shows no sign of ending. In some surveys, 50 percent to 90 percent of the animals hauled up from the deep are unknown. We'll have to keep expanding our conception of what it means to be an Earthling.
Wow! That is one cool article! I cant believe that their have been whole species of animals down in depths of the ocean that we have never known about! A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!!! Science = neat! For sure is neato!
Posted by katie on November 15,2007 | 07:42PM
I an´t wait to buy that book! As a scientific books collectionist I can´t miss this one...must be great! Thank you for the information!
Posted by F. J. PECHIR on November 16,2007 | 04:13PM
I'm using this article with my 3rd graders. I want them to know more about our oceans and what lies beneath! More than sharks and whales!
Posted by Sharon Aumick on January 9,2008 | 07:13AM
Appreciated your article, but was hoping that the pictures would be included. I was just at the hospital, and was reading the October 2007 issue of Smithsonian, and was amazed by the interesting creatures most of us are not privileged to see. They are exquisitely designed and so beautiful in colour, we have so much more to learn, one would never tire of it!! Is there a way one could see the pictures that were in the magazine? Thank you, Robin Simmons
Posted by Robin Simmons on January 12,2008 | 11:39AM
Fantastic pictures! Can the Grimpoteuthis species actually see at the depths described or are those eyes just remnants of evolution? It is hard to perceive that if they can see and if they rise to the sunlit layer, that they would not explode due to less pressure.
Posted by Fred Acree on January 24,2008 | 03:51AM
how do sea creatures get energy in the deep???????
Posted by ann robinson on February 11,2008 | 01:56PM
Thanks for this eye-opening article! It perfectly illustrates "the mysteriously mysterious mystery" mentioned by the Daoist philosopher Lao Zi. I have shared it with students in my Chinese Philosophy class at San Diego State University. One student was so impressed he now has a tattoo of one of the sea creatures,
Posted by Sandra A. Wawrytko on April 30,2008 | 11:22AM
there's more?
Posted by rex on June 28,2008 | 11:24AM
i love the pictures.
Posted by D Daspit on September 17,2008 | 10:03AM
I bought this book a few months ago. It is the most incredible book about life that you will likely find. I may have 1,000 books in my library about Biology, Zoology , etc... but none compare to this.The photography and the species illustrated are completely awesome.
Posted by Steve Zaga on November 5,2008 | 07:54AM
Could this be what ETs look like? Have we discovered alien life as it exists on other planets at the bottom of the ocean on this planet.... These creatures are so alien in appearance to anything else on the planet and in the ocean closer to the surface that they appear otherworldly. Bioluminescence is without a doubt the most amazing phenomena in nature. There seems to be a supernatural component to it.
Posted by steve ehrlich on February 25,2009 | 02:07PM
*I'm at a loss for words*
Posted by Rizzi on February 25,2009 | 05:01PM
Well, here is a list of possible natural causes, forces, mechanisms that made these creatures:
1)The informations for doing these creatures comes 80 or 90% from Earth's nucleous, inside volcanic magma, and 20 or 10% from the scarcest particles of solar energy. Informations for doing a finished nucleotide comes 50% from Earth's nucleous and 50% from our star, like it is necessary informations from a male and a female for doing an animal superior. There is a game between the two sources,about dominance and recessivity, like a binary digit creating fuzzy logic;
2) Since we have the anatomic model of the primary source from where is coming 100% of informations, by comparative anatomy between that model and any creature's shape, we can identify the differeences and seamness, so, we can identify the informations used in the constituion of the creature. The anatomic model is shared in two sides of the same face, the side about hardware (physical mass)and the side about software (internal energetic flow of information) and it is exposed at http://theuniversalmatrix.com
By the way, there are a lot of things about these creatures that is visible only by the models of matrix theory.
Posted by Louis Morelli on February 25,2009 | 09:14PM
what are 90% of sea creatures made up of ? need answer asap
Posted by rauna on March 29,2009 | 03:58PM