And if you need to deliver gifts on land, Boston Dynamics has also got you covered.

The post AUV with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’m kind of obsessed with Okeanos Explorer. Why? Because being able to watch a live feed of an ROV exploring the deep ocean on the TV in my living room is pretty amazing. THE FUTURE IS NOW PEOPLE.

Okeanos Explorer is a NOAA boat whose sole business is ocean exploration. It uses two ROVs equipped with mega giant cameras and a network of satellite intertubes to bring you live feed of seafloor exploration. It beams back all sorts of amazing images of weird deep sea sea beasties and geology. Quite often they find specimens they have never even seen before! Just last mission they even explored a wrecked WWII plane! Current mission: The Wake Islands in the Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument.

The next dive will happen this Sunday. You can catch all the feeds on your compy at their streaming link http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/media/exstream/exstream.html

If you have a smart TV, ROKU, Apple TV or really any other streaming device you can WATCH IT ON YOUR TV. Just pull up the YouTube app and search for Okeanos Explorer. Camera 1 is where the action is, but Camera 2 (ROV #2) and Camera 3 (Control room) are pretty neat too.

You can also follow along on Twitter at #Okeanos, lots of biologists online to identify all the things! Or post-dive check out Christopher Mah over at Echinoblog with some sea-beastie round ups.

The post Have you been watching Okeanos explorer? If not, this week is your chance! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

One thing I’ve learned from the Okeanos Explorer’s ROV trip to the Marianas Trench, is that deep sea jellyfish just like to let it all hang out. How else you going to feed effectively if you don’t wave your tentacles around like you just don’t care? But get too close to this unidentified jelly, and you risk triggering its Inspector Gadget quality evasive maneuvers. RETRACT! SWIM AWAY! Live to extend another day. You go jelly, you go.

More awesome videos and photos from this incredible series of dives can be found here.

The post GO GO GADGET JELLYFISH! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

New spectacular video of a enigmatic jellyfish is going viral across the internet (see below).  Although first collected in 1901 and scientifically described in 1910, the giant jellyfish,Stygiomedusa gigantea, is rarely collected or seen.  A paper in 2010 by Mark Benfield and William Graham found that only 110 observations of the species had been made from 1899 to 2009.  However while rare, Stygiomedusa gigantea is found in every ocean except the Arctic.  The lack of this large jelly in the Arctic likely reflects a lack of deep-sea exploration there as opposed to a true absence.

This jelly is likely one of the largest invertebrate predators currently in the ocean.  Current size estimates put the bell diameter around 0.5-0.75 meters (1.6-2.5 feet). The species actually does not have tentacles as we associate with other jellyfish. Instead what you see dangling down are oral lobes which can reach ~10 meters (32.8 feet) in length.  Benfield and Graham found two individuals in the Gulf of Mexico clinging to underwater structures and hypothesized the jelly uses its long oral lobes to hold on to and trap prey.

Although not all fish appear to be simply food for this giant jelly.  Drazen and Robison found that the small fish Thalassobathia pelagica swimming continuously swimming around the bell of Stygiomedusa gigantea. Interestingly, nematocysts of another jelly, the common moon jelly, could sting the fish but it was unharmed by the those of S. gigantea.

The latest video. I’m not sure what is up with the music.

The post Rare Giant Jellyfish Caught on Video first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now imagine you are an ROV sampling whilst exploring in majestic submarine Mendocino Canyon. You see a brown wall of poo-colored water heading towards you. You, unfortunately, are about to be engulfed by the undersea version of an avalanche: a turbidity current.

In case you can’t really imagine exactly what that means, here is that ROV just sciencing along in Mendocino Canyon in normal conditions.

Now here’s that same ROV inside the turbidity current.

Turbidity currents are ridiculously fast, bottom-trapped currents that flow down steep ocean slopes. They are turbulent: the currents inside them are a mess of chaotic eddies and turbid: filled with sediment. In the GIF above, the billows and eddies are the turbulence, the poo-color is sediment. Sediment can be made up of a variety of things: mud, sand, tiny rocks, big rocks, boulders, dead plants and animals, and even animal poo. Thus the poo-color.

While it’s the turbulence that causes the turbidity currents surface to form gorgeous undulations, it’s the sediment that makes them flow. Turbidity currents are gravity currents, driven by gravity pulling a heavy sediment-laden density current down a slope through lighter sediment-free water around it.

All it takes to form a turbidity current is a jostle of the seafloor by either an earthquake, landslide, submarine with obnoxiously loud subwoofers or even pulses of river outflow. Murky sea floor goo becomes suspended in the water. The goo makes the water denser and heavier. Then the goo-filled water flows downhill picking up speed until it becomes a turbidity current.

Just like avalanches, turbidity currents are incredibly fast (up to 60 miles per hour!) and have been known to take out anything that gets in their way. After the Grand Banks earthquake in 1929, a turbidity current proceeded to sequentially snap a submarine telegraph cable in 12 places as it hauled ass down the continental slope. GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY FISHIES.

While the dance of 1000 turbulent billows may just look like a pretty side effect, they are important for turbidity current growth and death. The billows sour the seafloor, scooping up sediment into the turbidity current in a process known as entrainment. With more sediment, the current becomes bigger, denser, faster, and even more turbulent. MOAR turbulence -> MOAR turbidity -> MOAR speed ->MOAR turbulence. It’s like a perpetual motion machine of turbid turbulence. But eventually all turbidity currents must leave their slopey racetracks and die on the flat plains of the deep ocean. The current slows down, the billows start to fade and all that sediment is deposited on the seafloor again.

To my knowledge, this is a pretty unique video because turbidity currents occur intermittently and are rarely observed (because they’ve probably trashed your instruments as they went by). But in geological time, turbidity currents occur pretty frequently because we can map and date their remains, turbidites (That’s turbidite with a b, not to be confused with the turdidite your coworker forgot to flush). As the turbidity currents flows downhill it not only entrains sediment, but it also deposits sediment on the seafloor. Like a slug, the turbidity current leaves a tell-tale trail behind it made up of pebbles, silt, sand and probably some slime that is really hard to get off your hands. Slice through the seafloor and you can see hundreds and even thousands of these trails layered on top of each other stretching out over hundreds of miles.

It’s notoriously hard to put in moorings in Monterey canyon because turbidity currents have a penchant for ripping them from the sea floor. The fact that this ROV got caught in one and managed not only to survive but also keep on sciencing in the process is pretty badass. I’m just glad neither myself nor my instruments have ever been in the path of one.

Sumner, E. J., & Paull, C. K. (2014). Swept away by a turbidity current in Mendocino submarine canyon, California. Geophysical Research Letters,41(21), 7611-7618.

Want to see MOAR turbidity current? Check out the whole video with the ROV in Mendocino Canyon.

And for no particular reason, here are 4 minutes of turbidity currents with a dubstep soundtrack.

The post ROV gets caught in turbidity current, lives to tell the tale. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This is how it transpired. Two energetic high school computer science teachers, on a whim, decided to enter their high school, a Title I school where most of the students live in poverty, into a sophisticated underwater robotics competition sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and NASA, among others. Only four boys signed up for the competition. But once assembled, with enthusiasm and verve, they called oceanic engineers and military contractors for design help. They were advised that their underwater robot would require glass syntactic flotation foam. But short on money, all they could afford was PVC pipe from Home Depot. And duct tape.  After a few test runs of their PVC and duct-taped robot, the team was confident that they would not come in last at the event, so they all piled into a beat up van to head to the venue for the competition. The boys entered the main pool area, seeing college teams in matching gear, with robots sponsored by the likes of Exxon Mobil. On the first run, the PVC did not hold up. The robot leaked. And sunk. The boys put their heads together and hilariously came up with a brilliant solution. 12 hours later, armed with 8 super-plus tampons to plug the leak in the mechanical housing, the PVC robot was lowered into the pool again – but this time, performed admirably. Fast forward to a shocking result. This rag-tag high school team of undocumented Mexican boys did what no one thought was possible.

This competition, however, was only the beginning. These boys began a legacy that could not have been imagined. A legacy which inspired the next generation of students that science and technology might be a pathway forward. A legacy which inspired the next generation of students to solve problems. And to have a voice. (Many of these engineering students have become activists and community leaders, particularly around (a) teaching younger middle school students about technology, and (b) the Dream Act.)

It this doesn’t get your right in the feels then there is no help for your soul. You can rent or buy the video here.

The post How the sons of undocumented Mexican immigrants built a ROV and won a national competition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The dive to 10,902 meters (6.8 miles) occurred on May 31, 2009, at the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean…On its dive to the Challenger Deep, Nereus spent over 10 hours on the bottom, sending live video back to the ship through its fiber-optic tether and collecting geological and biological samples with its manipulator arm, and placed a marker on the seafloor signed by those onboard the surface ship.

Fast forward just less than 5 years and another trench has spelled the demise of Nereus.

On Saturday, May 10, 2014, at 2 p.m. local time (10 p.m. Friday EDT), the hybrid remotely operated vehicle Nereus was confirmed lost at 9,990 meters (6.2 miles) depth in the Kermadec Trench northeast of New Zealand. The unmanned vehicle was working as part of a mission to explore the ocean’s hadal region from 6,000 to nearly 11,000 meters deep. Scientists say a portion of it likely imploded under pressure as great as 16,000 pounds per square inch….At the time it was lost, it was 30 days into a 40-day expedition on board the research vesselThomas G. Thompson to carry out the first-ever, systematic study of a deep-ocean trench as part of the NSF-sponsored Hadal Ecosystems Study (HADES) project under chief scientist Timothy Shank, a WHOI biologist who also helped conceive the vehicle.

Researchers on the Thompson lost contact with the vehicle seven hours into a planned nine-hour dive at the deepest extent of the trench. When standard emergency recovery protocols were unsuccessful, the team initiated a search near the dive site. The team onboard spotted pieces of debris floating on the sea surface that were later identified as coming fromNereus, indicating a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle. The ship’s crew is recovering the debris to confirm its identity and in the hope that it may reveal more information about the nature of the failure.

The post Nereus confirmed lost first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Magnapinna

On November 11, 2007., a  Shell oil company ROV capture a Magnapinna on video (below) at a depth of 2386 meters (~1.5 miles). Someone (I’ve been unable to track down who created this), used the video to produce a single image of this individual (above). It was subsequently posted to Reddit. Love the image of this fascinating creature.

The post An amazing image of the elusive big-fin squid first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The two leading contenders seems to be that it is A) an old whale placenta or B) a rare and enigmatic deep-sea jellyfish.  And the answer is…. B)

A) So why is not an old whale placenta?  The video is from approximately 5000 feet (1500 m). A placenta would need to sink to this depth without any other organism consuming it.  Unlikely given that its rate of decent would have been slow and any organic food source in the deep sea is unlikely to last long.

B) So why is it a jellyfish?* In 1967, F.S. Russell described a very enigmatic deep-sea jellyfish, Deepstaria enigmatica.

During Dive 159 of the U.S. research submersible Deepstar 400 on 22 October 1966 Dr. Eric G. Barham, Dr. George Pickwell, and Mr. Ronald Church collected a remarkable scyphomedusan at a depth of about 723 m in the San Diego Trough…when first noted, the jellyfish’s margin was collapsed and the [outer, convex surface of the umbrella] indented.

In other words it didn’t look like much of a jellyfish.  Sound familiar?

On opposite sides of the umbrella are two large tubular shaped processes…It has a yellowish brown tinge…The radial canal system is most striking.  It consists of a meshwork, likened by Dr. Barham to wire-netting.

The gonads are situated along the margins of fan-shape mesenteries, and tend to be broken up into several isolated processes with incurved edges.

In 1988 Larson and colleagues published further work describing this rare group of jellyfish.  They too noted the unique canal system.

But it is these researcher’s behavioral notes that I find most interesting.

These two species of Deepstaria display some unique behaviour; peristaltic locomotion and pursing of the bell margin are unknown in other medusae. Probably the peristaltic locomotion is necessary because the umbrella is too thin and the subumbrella musculature too diffuse to support more rapid pulsation. Our observations of both species of Deepstaria suggest that they usually hang  motionless with the umbrella open…It seems probable to us that medusae in this genus are large ambush predators in the meso- and bathypelagic environment…we speculate that the feeding behaviour might be as follows. The medusae usually hang vertically and motionless with the bell open; occasional peristaltic contractions probably enable them to swim slowly, at least enough to retard sinking. Because the area of the subumbrella is so large, upward-swimming prey occasionally would swim into it. Once prey enter the large subumbrellar chamber, the contact stimulates rapid contraction of the coronal muscle, pursing the umbrella shut and trapping the prey. As the prey attempts to escape, it contacts nematocysts on the subumbrella, being repeatedly stung until weakened. It may additionally become covered with mucus and further immobilized. Then peristalsis and ciliary movement could transport the prey towards the mouth where the oral arms could grasp and engulf it…’Bagging’ prey in this way is not known in other medusae.

Russell, F. S. (1967). “On a remarkable new scyphomedusan Deepstaria enigmatica”. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK 47: 469-473.

Larson, R.; Madin L., Harbison, G. (1988). “In situ observations of deep water medusae of the genus Deepstaria, with a description of D. reticulum sp. nov.”. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK 68: 689-699.

*UPDATE: This has now also been confirmed by Dr. Steven Haddock of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Center, an expert on deep-sea and pelagic creatures.

UPDATE2: Steven Haddock provides some much better photos of Deepstaria engimatica on the Jellyfish Watch Facebook page.

UPDATE3: Several comments below suggest the species is Deepstaria reticulum.  Important thing is that it is still a jellyfish and already known.

The post Solving the Mystery of the Placental Jellyfish first appeared on Deep Sea News.

If you follow me on Twitter (@para_sight), you would have seen this week a steady stream of screen caps I grabbed from their live video feed (active at the time of publishing this), which I had running  constantly on a second screen in my office.  I’m not part of the OE team, but it’s pretty addictive viewing for the temporarily office-bound!  For non-Twitter folks, here’s a gallery of shots of some of the things they saw.  I am no expert on the taxonomy of deep sea critters; any bad ID’s are mine.  I’ll take any missing ID’s too, just add them to the comments.

If you want to go deeper into the science of deep sea critters, check out Dr Craig’s excellent piece today on what happens to wood at the bottom of the ocean.

The post TGIF – Pretty pictures from Okeanos Explorer first appeared on Deep Sea News.