The deep-sea environment of the piles of the earth are the home of mysterious ocean beings: gigantic six-spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, fantotomy jellyfish. However, finding and identifying these animals can be difficult; Some are only known because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the belly of sea birds. But on Christmas Day last year, the crew of the R/V Falkor (also), the research ship of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, fell a creature in the eye of seeing never before.
The team was planning to use his vehicle -operated vehicle, Subastian, in a site that is known as the Powell pelvis, but the movement of ice blocks forced the group instead to explore the outer edges of the region.
When the immersion dropped 7,000 feet, the team unexpectedly saw a shadow through the live feed, which turned out to be an Antarctic Gonate squid, a rare kind of Cephalopod, three feet long and a green cloud of ink.
“It was a beautiful squid,” said Andrew Thurber, a deep sea researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was on board the ship. “You always see beauty in the deep ocean, and this was just a classic example of it.”
No Antarctic Gonate Squid was once seen alive before, as far as the team was aware. They followed it for a few minutes and made sure she recorded it on video, capturing the red color of the being and white spots.
“Videos like these make me really enthusiastic,” said Linsey Sala, a museum scientist who manages the Pelagic Invertebrate Collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and was not involved in the expedition. Discovers of similar species “can really be informative for how they live life on great depths,” said Mrs. Sala. Non -Geidified Specimens can be in collections around the world, she added, in which case the video images can be useful to reveal what they are.
Previous observations of these types of squid are limited to individuals caught by fishing barrels and squid residues found in other marine animals, usually on the Falkland Islands.
“It is always exciting to see live images of a critter that was previously only known from dead specimens,” said Bruce Robison, a deep -sea -ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute that was also not involved in the expedition.
For those on board the ship, the discovery was “pure excavation,” Dr. Thurber. There was a fever of excitement even before they had properly identified the squid. To verify the species, Dr. Thurber and his colleagues the images recorded by the underwater vehicle to taxonoms around the world.
Kat Bolstad, a Cephalopod biologist at Auckland University of Technology in New -Zeeland, helped to identify the animal. The gender and age of the squid were difficult to determine, but the single hook in every tentacle, seen by the images sent to her, confirmed that the species was Antarcticus.
The hooks can be useful for securing and locking prey, a characteristic that is shared with other squid. The squid also had scratches on his arms and losers on his cloak, possibly from a recent attack by another marine animal.
Deep sea squids are difficult to meet and document. Performing thousands of feet under the sea surface is a challenge and expensive, and the animals tend to avoid remotely operated vehicles, which are often noisy and clear. These vehicles are “aliens of the depth,” said Dr. Thurber. “So it really depends on us to come and look at us.”
This specific dive was part of The National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Expedition, an initiative to document climate change in the mountains, rainforests and oceans.
This was not the first elusive squid that was filmed by Subastian, the vehicle -operated vehicle. This year also the immersion I saw a colossal squidMesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni, a century after the animal was first described in a scientific article.
But there is much less known about the Antarctic Gonate Squid, which lives in the waters of the southern ocean and spawns at depths under 2,000 feet.
Penguins in the region are known to taste squid on Antarctic Gonaat – smaller, anyway. They are also hunted by colossal squid, which share the same depths and waters.
The discovery promises to shed light on the life of Antarctic Gonate Squids and puts even more questions. How far move these squids? How wide is their reach? What do they feed in? How much larger do they grow?
“We know so little about that community that there can be all kinds of things that we can only ask ourselves about,” said Dr. Robison.
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