I’m gonna write a post of cool animal facts just to Blaze later. Typical deep sea anglerfish and some others are pretty famous but I’m going to spend maybe even ten whole dollars to make an extra thousand people look at these other fish that I don’t think enough people know about. Sources included for all images, many with additional information wherever possible, but there’s still very little known about many of these animals!
GIGANTACTIS - common name ”whipnose seadevil” - the Schmidt ocean institute recently took this detailed photo from a deep sea ROV of a fish almost never observed live, but it sure does actually look dead. These anglerfish spend most of their time floating upside-down like this with their proboscis-like lure dangling below, and one guess is that they may send the lure down into the tunnels of burrowing worms or crustaceans. In some species, the lure can be over six times the length of the body.
“On the E/V Nautilus, an exploration ship manned by the not-for-profit Ocean Exploration Trust, the organism’s “ball sort of unfolded into two folds”, said Susan Poulton, a spokesperson for the group, in a call from the ship.
“It revealed a foot and rhinophores, which are these ear-like structures, and you see a sort of proboscis come off the back of it,” she said. “That’s when it clearly became a gastropod of some kind.””
The Goblin shark extends its jaw way out in front of its body, then snaps it back to catch food. The jaw is suspended by ligaments, and not connected to the skull.
Go behind the scenes with our scientists and ROV pilots on June 30!
We’ll be streaming #LivefromtheDeep on an MBARI expedition to Sur Ridge—an underwater oasis of deep-sea corals and sponge gardens just off the coast of northern California, near Big Sur. MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles and state-of-the-art cameras let our scientists see the amazing creatures that call Sur Ridge home, and high-resolution mapping tools create stunning images of the seafloor.
Join us on June 30 at 11:00 a.m. (Pacific) and see live footage of the seafloor, ask our scientists and engineers your questions, and find out what it’s like to have a career exploring the deep ocean. Tune in to the livestream on MBARI’s website, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.
Thick aggregates of Bathymodiolus mussels on a cold seep site off of Nantucket. Source: NOAA
Humans aren’t the only users of fossil fuels. In many parts of the ocean, natural gas (methane) is constantly bubbling out of the sediment. These areas are known as cold seeps and are often a marker of productive fossil fuel reservoirs in the crust underneath. The name cold seep is somewhat of a misnomer…
