White Snailfish

A brand new kind of fish has just been found in one of the dark “lifeless” areas of the ocean. It was previously thought that the area was devoid of fish, researchers say.

This new kind of snailfish was discovered making its home at an amazing depth of 7 kilometers, in the Peru-Chile trench in the South East Pacific.

Large groups of cusk-eels and rather large scavengers were also found making themselves at home at these depths, which is a scientific first, researchers added.

The discoveries, in some of the deepest darkest recesses of our planet, were made by a group of marine biologists hailing from the University of Aberdeen, in conjunction with experts from Japan and New Zealand.

The team set out on a 21 day voyage, during which they made use of various deep-sea imaging equipment to snap photos of the murky depths, some 4500 meters to an astounding 8 kilometers within the trench.

This voyage was the seventh such voyage as part of HADEEP, a research project cooked up by the boys over at the University of Aberdeen’s Ocean Lab and the University of Tokyo’s Ocean Research Institute, along with the backing of New Zealand’s National institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

The use of the updated technology really gave researchers the boost they needed to discover this amazing find. Who knows what will be dredged up next? Science has been stale for such a long time, especially when you talk about the oceans, so it’s good to see some new discoveries being made right under our noses.

bluntnose sixgill shark

The Cape Eleuthera Institute, located in the sunny Bahamas, has just begun a new study this past week, which aims to figure out the numbers and diveristy of deep ocean sharks living in the calm waters of the all too popular tourist destination.

The scientists behind this new study include: Lucy Howey-Jordan, of Microwave Telemetry Incorprated; Dr. Demian Chapman, of Stony Brook University; and Dr. Dean Grubbs, of Florida State University. This group of savvy researchers has traveled to the Cape Eleuthera Institute to help get the project on its feet, and have had some great success.

During three days, performing six different surveys, the group managed to reel in six different species of deep water sharks. The sharks reeled in included some 13 foot bluntnose sixgill sharks, and even an 18 inch, which is still fully grown, sawtail catshark.

We don’t really know a whole lot about the myriad of species which dwell in the depths of our oceans and this is no less true when we talk about deep ocean sharks. Of all the current species of sharks known to man, fifty-six percent of them dwell below 600 feet of water. Of these fifty-six percent, only five of the species encompassed have life history, and only three species have movement patterns mapped out.

This study aims to change all that, and they are off to a good start. It hasn’t been at all harmful to the local tourism industry either. While the teams are buying goods and provisions locally, tourists are also being drawn to the research as well.

Thermal Vent

Well, just when you are comfortable knowing that what you know is accurate, the world comes along and throws you another curve ball. We used to know there were 9 planets, now there are 8, we used to know the earth was the center of the solar system, now we know better.. Now, just when you thought you pretty much knew your basic zoology, an amazing new discovery has been made that is basically going to force some poor guy to rewrite the molluscan, larval ecology and invertebrate text books.

Between the 1850’s and the 1870’s supposedly all known forms of snail were discovered. However, thanks to modern technology, and some persistent researchers, we now know that we were mistaken, and that the forms of snail are really much more diverse than originally thought.

This new snail larval form is really turning heads, and here’s why. This larval form discovered is the first of its kind to be found to be a free-swimming pre-veliger larva. This is rather interesting because normally they don’t swim freely. Not only that but it appears these new little guys can actually turn hydrogen sulfide, and methane as an energy source.. Imagine, a snail which subsists on farts…

Credited with this astounding discovery are Anders Waren, a Swedish Naturalist from the Royal Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, and collegue Philippe Bouchet.

They have been working on this project since the 1980s, and have finally made their marks on history. These are a pair to watch folks, who knows what they might discover next?

Herbert Nitsch - Picture by Eirik Solheim

Herbert Nitsch, a daredevil freediver, is getting ready to break his own world record by taking 1000 foot dive toward the bottom of the ocean, taking in only a single breath of air while contracting his lungs to the size of a tennis ball.

Wearing nothing but a standard issue wetsuit, Herbert Nitsch is planni9ng to strap himself to a plank and use a rope to guide him into the murky depths off of Greece in November, minimizing movement needed to do so.

While he fights to stay conscious in the mounting pressure of the water, he will be letting an airbag go to pull him back to safety. In order to survive on a single breath of air, Nitsch has developed the uncanny ability to slow down his heart rate and put a lid on his breathing reflex.

The pressures he will be facing are extraordinary. At the bottom of the dive, he will be subjected to pressures of 450 pounds per square inch, that is ten times more than your standard car tire.

Back in 2007, the Australian airline pilot got to an amazing depth of 702 feet, using a technique which involved him moving his essential organs into his chest cavity to protect them from the pressure, however the biggest risk he will face is a buildup of nitrogen in his blood, which can cause narcosis.

If successful, this dive will be the world record, and it will probably remain so for a long time to come.

A conglomerate of Canadian and Spanish researchers have discovered new marine life, which have been previously unknown to the scientific community, and some are even over a 1,000 years old. They are hoping that these creatures will shed some light into the secrets of the ancient underwater ecosystems.

Scientists from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography in conjunction with three Canadian universities and the Fisheries Department are going on a 20 day expedition to take some photos and pick up samples of coral and sponges up to 3 kilometers deep in the cold waters off the Newfoundland coast.

The team will be studying 11 different areas which are under the protection of the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization.

These are important areas of study as they are the home to the “trees of the ocean” explains a research scientist with the Fisheries Department, Ellen Kenchington. Ellen is also leading the expedition.

The coral which can be found in these areas can be several meters tall and is sufficient enough in size to change the flow of currents. It is also the home to many other fish and other aquatic life.

The aim of the study is to see whether or not these areas need further protection from fishing to help keep the species abundant.

Ellen went on to explain that scientists can actually take a look at the chemical makeup of the coral and figure out the temperature of the water and other information dating back as far as 1,000 years!

For pictures see
http://www.montrealgazette.com

In the ocean, krill live together in swarms, some of them stretching for tens of kilometres. Krill swarms are some of the largest gatherings of life on the planet and this naturally poses some puzzling questions to science: Why are krill living together? How do they find each other? Why are some swarms enormous when others are more moderately sized?

In an effort to shed some light on the mystery, a team of British Antarctic Survey (BAS) researchers headed by Dr Geraint Tarling set out to study the composition and structure of 4525 separate krill swarms in the Scotia Sea. Despite its name, the Scotia Sea is not located close to home for these British scientists – it is a vast expanse of water situated partly in the Southern Ocean and partly in the Atlantic; between Argentina and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Using echo-sounding equipment, the Tarling team tracked down the krill living in this 900,000 km² area and what they found surprised them. According to this new research, krill normally gather into two different types of swarms. The first type is relatively small, typically not exceeding a length of 50 meters and a depth of 4 meters. In this comparatively small type of swarm, the density of krill isn’t very high – you will just find an average of ten krill per cubic meter.

The other type of swarm – dubbed “superswarm” by the researchers – is on the other hand a very densely packed group with up to 100 krill per cubic meter. These dense congregations are the ones that grow really big, often stretching over one kilometre in length and averaging almost 30 meter in depth.

“I was coming at it thinking there might be small swarms tightly packed, and then large swarms that were a bit more diffuse,” says Dr Tarling. “But what we actually found was the opposite. There were small swarms that were quite diffuse and large swarms that were tightly packed.”

This means that a majority of the krill living in the Scotia Sea at any one time will be found within one of just a few enormous superswarms.

“We talking trillions of krill in one aggregation,” explains Dr Tarling. “Ten or 12 swarms could explain 60 or 70% of the biomass in an area the size of the eastern Atlantic. It was astonishing how much biomass could be concentrated into such a small area.”

A fishing flee scooping up a whole swarm of krill may therefore be removing the majority of krill from the Southern Ocean in just one short fishing trip if they happen to target one of the superswarms instead of a small swarm.

How does a superswarm come about?

Although they weren’t able to fully answer this question, Tarling and his colleagues managed to pinpoint certain factors that make superswarms more likely to appear.

“The factors we identified included whether there was more likely to be a lot of food around or not, and when there wasn’t that much food around, they tended to form larger swarms,” says Dr Tarling.

Age is also of importance. The smaller, diffuse swarms typically contained adult krill, while the enormous superswarms consisted of densely packed juvenile individuals.

“Where the animals were less mature, they were more likely to form the larger swarms,” says Dr Tarling, adding that he doesn’t know why.

It might be a question of safety in numbers; it is common among prey animals to live in large groups to reduce the risk of getting eaten, and krill is after all a favoured meal by a long row of sea living creatures.

“All types of swarms are probably to a greater or lesser extent an antipredator response,” Dr Tarling says.

But although living in a swarm reduces the risk of being eaten, it also means having to compete with all the other members of the group for food. Juvenile krill are more buoyant than adults, which mean that they spend less energy swimming. Perhaps this is why adult krill prefers to live in smaller congregations; their negative buoyancy forces them to eat more so they can’t afford living in a huge swarm densely surrounded by competitors.

On the other hand, being in a swarm has been shown to be more energetically efficient than being isolated.

“For a juvenile that wants to grow very quickly, saving energy could be a bonus for them,” says Dr Tarling.

Night-time mystery

As a scientist, you often find yourself in a situation where new findings answer one question but simultaneously create three new ones. One of the new conundrums that Dr Tarling has brought back home from his research trip is the following: Why are superswarms more likely to form at night?

“That is more puzzling for us to explain,” says Dr Tarling. “Up until this point, most polar biologists believed that the swarms dispersed [at night], because that’s the time they feed. When daylight comes they get back into the swarm again for the antipredator benefit. But we found the opposite to that.”

The research has been published in the journal Deep Sea Research I.

No, this fish is not animated by Pixar – it is a very real fish created by Mother Nature deep down in the ocean. Its name is Macropinna microstoma and it has puzzled ichthyologists since it was first described by Chapman in 1939.

Macropinna microstoma, also known as the Barreleye fish, has a fluid-filled dome on its head through which the lenses of its barrel shaped eyes can be clearly seen. The fish lives at a dept of 600-800 metres where it spends most of its time hanging almost completely still in the water.

Even though the Barreleye was described by science in the late 1930s, the transparent dome is a fairly new discovered since it is normally destroyed when the fish is brought up from the deep. Old drawings of the fish do not show the see-through part of the head and the species was not photographed alive until 2004.

Thanks to new technology, it is now possible for researchers to explore the deep sea much more efficiently than ever before and we are therefore learning more and more about the weird and wonderful creatures that inhabit these baffling parts of the planet. It has long been known that the tubular eyes of the Barreleye are good at collecting light; an adaptation to a life deep down in the ocean where light is scarce. The eyes were however presumed to be fixed and the fish was therefore believed to have a very narrow upwards-facing tunnel-vision. Researchers Bruce Robinson and Kim Reisenbichler from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has now changed this notion completely by providing evidence suggesting that this fish can rotate its eyes within the transparent dome in order to see both upwards and straight forward. Robinson and Reisenbichler observed that when suitable prey, e.g. a jellyfish, is spotted, the fish will rotate its eyes to face forward as it turns its body from a horizontal to a vertical position to feed.

Robinson and Reisenbichler were able to get close to five living Barreleyes using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) at a depth of 600-800 meters off the coast of Central California. In addition to observing and filming the fish in its native habitat, the researchers also captured two specimens and placed them in an aquarium for a few hours in order to study them more closely.

Live specimens of Macropinna microstoma turned out to have beautifully coloured green eyes; probably in order to filter out sunlight from the surface of the ocean since this would make it easier for the fish to spot bioluminescent jellyfish. Robinson also suggests that Macropinna microstoma might be using its supreme eye sight to steal food from siphonophores[1].

If you want to know more about the intriguing Barreleye fish, check out the paper BH Robison and KR Reisenbichler (2008) – Macropinna microstoma and the paradox of its tubular eyes. Copeia[2]. 2008, No. 4, December 18, 2008.

New research has revealed that the tapetail, bignose and whalefish are in fact all the same fish.

For decades, three different names have been used for three very different looking underwater creatures: the Tapetail, the Bignose and the Whalefish. A team of seven scientists*, including Smithsonian curator Dr Dave Johnson, has now discovered that these three fishes are in fact part of the same family.

After studying the body structures of the tapetails (Mirapinnidae), bignose fish (Megalomycteridae) and whalefish (Cetomimidae) and taking advantage of modern DNA-analysis, the team realized that the three are actually the larvae, male and female, respectively, of a single fish family – Cetomimidae (also known as Flabby whalefish).

“This is an incredibly significant and exciting finding,” says Johnson. “For decades scientists have wondered why all tapetails were sexually immature, all bignose fishes were males and all whalefishes were females and had no known larval stages. The answer to part of that question was right under our noses all along—the specimens of tapetails and bignose fishes that were used to describe their original families included transitional forms—we just needed to study them more carefully.”

If you wish to find out more, the article “Deep-sea mystery solved: astonishing larval transformations and extreme sexual dimorphism unite three fish families” has been published in the journal Biology Letters by the Royal Society, London.

http://publishing.royalsociety.org/

http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/g06648352k5m1562/

* The seven scientists behind the discovery are:

G.David Johnson, Division of Fishes, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, USA

John R. Paxton, Ichthyology, Australian Museum, Sydney, New South Wales 2010, Australia

Tracey T. Sutton, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Gloucester Point, VA 23062, USA

Takashi P. Satoh, Marine Bioscience, Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Nakano-ku, Tokyo 164-8639, Japan

Tetsuya Sado, Zoology, Natural History Museum and Institute, Chuo-ku, Chiba 266-8682, Japan

Mutsumi Nishida, Marine Bioscience, Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Nakano-ku, Tokyo 164-8639, Japan

Masaki Miya, Zoology, Natural History Museum and Institute, Chuo-ku, Chiba 266-8682, Japan

A group of scientists from the Catalyst One expedition has discovered three previously unknown coral reefs 35 miles of the coast of Florida. The coral reefs consist mainly of Lophelia coral and are located at a depth of 450 metres (1475 feet).

Lophelia pertusa is a cold-water coral famous for its lack of zooxanthellae. The well known coral reefs found in warm, shallow waters – such as the Great Barrier Reef – consist of reef building corals that utilize energy from the sun by forming symbiotic relationship with photosynthesising algae. Lophelia pertusa on the other hand lives at great depths where there isn’t enough sunlight to sustain photosynthesising creatures, and survives by feeding on plankton.

The deep-sea reef habitat formed by Lophelia pertusa is important for a long row of deep water species, such as lanternfish, hatchetfish, conger eels and various molluscs, amphipods, and brittle stars. The reefs that we see today are extremely old, since Lophelia reefs typically grow no more than 1 mm per year. Unfortunately, these deep reefs are today being harmed by trawling and oil extraction.

The Catalyst One expedition will submit its newly acquired information to the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council to provide further data for the proposed Deep Coral Habitat Area of Particular Concern (HAPC).

The Catalyst One expedition is a collaboration between the Waitt Institute for Discovery, the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It combines the scientific expertise of Harbor Branch’s senior research professor, John Reed, with Woods Hole’s high-tech operations skills and Waitt Institute’s modern autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).

In order to reach these great depths and efficiently explore substantial areas, the expedition used REMUS 6000 AUV vehicles capable of carrying two kinds of sonar and a camera. With this type of equipment, each mission can last for up to 18 hours and provides the researchers with mosaic pictures of the bottom, pictures that can then be pieced together to form a detailed, high-definition map.

“Rarely do scientific expeditions produce solid results this quickly,” says Dr Shirley Pomponi, executive director of Harbor Branch. “This is a big win for the resource managers tasked with protecting these reefs and proof that cutting edge technology combined with the seamless teamwork of the three organisations involved in Catalyst One can accelerate the pace of discovery.”

You can find more information about the Catalyst program at the Waitt Institute for Discovery.

http://waittinstitute.org/wid/catalyst/

http://waittinstitute.org/wid/news/catalyst1.html

A ROV (remote operated vehicle) owned and operated by the oil company Shell have caught video of a very rare squid while filming a mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater on the drilling site known as Perdido in the gulf of Mexico. The squid known as a Magnapinna squid has a unique look due to the fact that it has “elbows” on its arms. Little is known about these enigmatic squids that can grow to be between 5 to 23 feet (1.5 to 7 meters) long.

See video – See pictures

A total of four species of these squids have been found so far but there are likely more species still waiting to be discovered.

Magnapinna pacifica was the first species to be described and was described in 1998 by Michael Vecchione of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and University of Hawaii biologist Richard Young based on juvenile squids. Michael Vecchione and Richard Young later released a report that showed that Magnapinna squids are common in deep sea areas around the world. (Below about 4,000 feet (1,219 meters).)

The second species, M. talismani, was described in 2006 and the year after a third species M. atlantica was described. Both these species have been found in the Atlantic.

The last known species has yet to receive a scientific name.