3 min read
And now, from the cold black bottom of the Atlantic, the best thing anyone filmed all week. A team aboard the research vessel Falkor (too) dropped a robot into the deep water off the coast of Brazil and, over a couple of weeks, brought back more than 30 species entirely new to science: a gossamer worm, nine kinds of jellyfish, seven siphonophores and seven comb jellies, most of them shimmering, translucent and utterly alien.
The midnight zone, where the weird things live
This is the ocean’s midwater: the enormous twilight-to-pitch-black column between the sunlit surface and the seafloor. It is the single largest living space on the planet and one of the least explored patches of anywhere. The animals down there are mostly gelatinous, soft, delicate, gorgeous bodies that a traditional collecting net turns into anonymous mush the instant it touches them. Which is precisely why so much of it has stayed a mystery. You cannot study what you have already destroyed on the way up.
How they did it without wrecking the evidence
The Schmidt Ocean Institute team got around the mush problem with laser imaging, capturing 3D, millimetre-scale footage of each creature alive and intact in its own habitat, backed up by gentle collection tools that treat a jellyfish like the fragile thing it is. The payoff is speed. Describing a new species usually takes years, sometimes decades of painstaking work, but the combination of kit and expertise let this team confirm dozens as new within days. Imagine turning up to work and adding thirty fresh branches to the tree of life before your fortnight is out.
Why this matters more than “cool jellyfish”
Because you cannot protect what you have never met. Every one of these animals is a data point in an ecosystem we are already busy warming, overfishing and, before very long, eyeing up for deep-sea metal mining. Cataloguing what actually lives down there before the machines arrive is not a nice-to-have, it is the whole argument. In fairness, it is also just plainly wondrous, and after a week of billionaires and gas turbines it is a relief to be reminded that most of this planet is still gloriously, defiantly unmapped. You can feel the pressure and the cold and the dark coming off the footage, a world that has never once cared that we exist.
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Did you know: the deep ocean’s midwater zone is thought to hold more animal biomass than the entire rest of the ocean combined, and scientists reckon the overwhelming majority of the species living there have never been named or seen by human eyes. We have sharper maps of the surface of Mars than of the water covering most of our own planet.