A team of scientists recently wrapped up a 40-day research voyage (jealous!) from the Salas y Gómez Ridge to Rapa Nui, commonly known as Easter Island. Situated off the coast of Chile, this ridge is teeming with biodiversity and is being considered for designation as a high-seas marine protected area. Led by Drs. Erin E. Easton from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Javier Sellanes from the Universidad Católica del Norte, the team meticulously studied 10 seamounts and two islands along the 2900-kilometer-long underwater mountain range. Their findings reveal distinct ecosystems on each seamount, including glass sponge gardens and deep coral reefs.

The post Hump Day Happiness: Dive into Deep-Sea Delights first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Schmidt Ocean has posted new 4K video of a suite of amazing organisms from seamounts of the coast of Chile. I, however, strongly feel the video should have been accompanied by Chilean music. So set the Schmidt video to mute and play this instead or go here to this rather busy remix.

The post Seamounts of the Southeast Pacific first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Basket stars, so named for the dizzying and multi-branching nature of their convoluted arms, often perch atop coral or rocky formations. From this high mount, the basket star cna extends its arms in faster moving waters away from the seafloor to ensnare drifting zooplankton for food. Its arms, equipped with tiny hooks and sticky mucus, capture prey that gets passed to its central mouth.

The post Arms of the Abyss first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Take a break from the madness of #blackfriday2018 & marvel at these swimming sea cucumbers, seen during recent #Okeanos expedition: https://t.co/HneVxh2JiI pic.twitter.com/MEYO9OKmQb

— NOAA Ocean Explorer (@oceanexplorer) November 23, 2018

From by Dr. Chris Mah, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, November 7, 2018, and posted at OceanExplorer.  (check Dr. Mah on his blog, Echinoblog, and on Twitter @echinoblog).

The swimming sea cucumber, Enypniastes eximia, sometimes referred to as the “headless chicken monster,” is a widespread species present in the abyss. It is encountered widely around the world with records from the Gulf of Mexico, Tropical Atlantic, East Atlantic, New Zealand, and the Southern Ocean (Antarctica). The scientific name Enypniastes was assigned to this animal in 1882 and means “dreamer;” it was taken from Genesis 37:19 of the Septuagint: “… Behold, that dreamer comes.”

Read more at NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

The post Holothurian Hill first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, three quarters of a mile deep, lies the peak of an underwater mountain.  Rising 1.4 miles off the abyssal plains, Davidson Seamount, nearly 26 miles long and 8 miles wide, is one of the largest known seamounts in U.S. waters. Davidson contains an abundance of life including massive groves of large bubblegum corals and reefs of glass sponges.  Life is so abundant at the seamount, we proposed nearly a decade ago that Davidson Seamount with its dense aggregations of invertebrates may serve as source of many species to nearby canyons and rocky outcrops off the California coast.  Davidson may be a perfect habitat for many species allowing their populations to explode.  This Davidson Seamount cradle then may serve as source of migrating individuals into other less perfect habitats nearby.  This idea of Davidson as a biodiversity source was instrumental in getting Davidson added to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS) in 2009.

A recent expedition by NOAA, MBNMS, and Nautilus, returned to Davidson Seamount.  And is typical of Davidson delivered with a spectacular display of life.   Over 1,000 individuals of the small sized octopus Muusoctopus robustus were caught on video hugging the rocks in a brooding position.  It is unclear why these octopuses are using the seamount as a nursery.  Higher currents around seamounts may bring more oxygenated waters.  The dense aggregations of other animals may provide abundant prey.  The crevasse, cracks, and rocky rubble of this old volcano may provide shelter from predators.

The post An Octopus Nursery Discovered on a Deep Underwater Mountain first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Look at These Amazing Deep-Sea Creatures from the Remote Pacific Right Now first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I’ve been lucky enough to see a few live trachymedusae in my lifetime. They’re among the most beautiful jellies I know, with fascinating colors and structures. Why this jelly has two types of tentacles–those facing up and those facing down–is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a way to help it capture prey? But what might that prey be? We really don’t know.

So much left to learn and discover!

The post This deep-sea jelly looks like something from a dream 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.

It started in 1996 with a bright green bucket. Chris Griner, an able seaman at the United States Coast Guard, stopped by with a few gallons of deep-sea mud. Having walked by Joan’s studio a few times, he wondered if she could use the seafloor mud to build pottery. Joan stuck some mud in the kiln spyhole, and it melted into a glassy puddle, catching her completely off-guard. In her quest to learn more about the mysterious melting properties of this deep-sea mud, Joan met staff members at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who gave her little samples of sediment from all across the globe. And each one melted into a different pattern on the clay. Some sediments fired soft green, others a crackly brown. And so she went to work.

“I never thought the sea floor was as muddy as that” Joan tells me as we walk through her studio. Today she has an impressive collection of ceramics and sea-floor muds, including a small bag with deep brown mud from the Marianas Trench–the deepest place on Earth. This mud is precious, and she uses it more as an accent rather than as a whole glaze. But that’s not the only unique sample she has. Rather than the deep sea, how about the deep past? A cup glazed with sediment from the K-T boundary layer, perhaps? This sediment is from a literal line in the sand separating the age of the dinosaurs from the age of mammals. Or maybe you prefer a more recent history? Pick up a vase glazed with sediment from an 8th century BC Phoenician Wreck. And for the ocean lovers, Antarctic bowls, hydrothermal vent tea cups and mid-Atlantic Ridge mugs pepper her shelves. Can’t decide? Get a little of all seven seas with one of her mixed-mud pieces. Really, it’s an art-nerd-meets-science-nerd paradise.

The best part for me is that all of this work represents a collaboration of science and art–all of the sediment Joan uses comes from scientists who donate leftover mud. And in the words of one scientist, “you don’t know what it’s like to work with material 20 or 30 years, never expect this, and then see it in this form.” It’s a way to transform the remote far-away places into something beautiful and tangible that can fit in your hands.

Joan’s work isn’t exactly cheap, though in other ways it’s priceless. It took me about a month to build up the nerve and income to drop $90 on a mug made with a bit of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The muds she uses are from all over, and unlike commercial glazes they are not chemically well-characterized. For muds with lots of heavy metals, like hydrothermal vents sediment, Joan only glazes the outside of cups. Other muds she’s less concerned about, though it’s something to keep in mind, especially if you intend to use it daily with hot or acidic liquids (like wine). Though my new mug is something I intend to treat with care, I also fully intend to use it.

I may never visit the Mid-Atlantic ridge, or see the Havre Seamount in real life, but like Joan and her green bowl, I now get to wonder at these mysteries a little bit every day. And that’s not a bad way to start the morning.

To check out more of Joan’s work, or snag one of these beautiful works for yourself, visit her website:

http://www.thesoftearthspeaks.com/

And online store:

http://store.thesoftearth.com/

The post How to hold a piece of the deep sea first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In the South Pacific, hovering over the peaks of seamounts at depths more than one kilometer deep swims a squid. This dark red squid, Idioteuthis cordiformis, well over one meter in length (3.2 feet) hovers here…waiting.   Other species in the whip lash squid family are diminutive with microscopic suckers. These species likely feed by dangling their tentacles waiting for prey to come near, merely passive predators. But Idioteuthis cordiformis is much larger with suckers so big other whip lash squid blush when they see them. Clearly Idioteuthis cordiformis cannot be a passive predator.

New work by Heather Braid and Kathrin Bolstad sequences the gut contents of this squid of the deep to shed light on this large red squid’s eating habits. The sequence data do indeed suggest that Idioteuthis cordiformis is an active predator…sometimes on sharks. DNA sequences in the gut matched the species birdbeak dogfish, Deania calcea, a deep-sea shark that can get over 1.2 meters (nearly 4 feet) and has a hankering for lots of shrimp.

Braid and Bolstad also examined stable isotopes for Idioteuthis cordiformis. Nitrogen is an important elements obtained from eating other stuff. The old adage “you are what you eat” is actually true to some extent. Each animal has a slightly different signature of stable isotope ratios that reflect the signature of preferred food items. The nitrogen isotopes, specifically Nitrogen-15 (N15), can show how high up the food chain an animal is. As organism eat each other, N15 is transferred to the predator. Thus, top predators have the highest N15 values. Idioteuthis cordiformis? The nitrogen values place this squid much higher than quite a few other squids including Architeuthis dux, the giant squid. Only one squid clearly beats out Idioteuthis cordiformis, the Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, a voracious predatory squid from closer to the surface. Don’t believe just watch this video. Even other squids don’t stand a chance next to the Humboldt squid.

Braid, H., & Bolstad, K. (2014). Feeding ecology of the largest mastigoteuthid squid species, Idioteuthis cordiformis (Cephalopoda, Mastigoteuthidae) Marine Ecology Progress Series, 515, 275-279 DOI: 10.3354/meps11008

The post Squid 1, Shark 0 first appeared on Deep Sea News.