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You're looking at a "supergiant," a type of amphipod found at the Kermadec Trench off New Zealand, at an ocean depth of over 4 miles. Deep sea amphipods are not unusual, but they're usually only about 3/4" to 1" long. As you can see in the photo above, the supergiants are a lot bigger:
Alan Jamieson, from the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, said: "It's a bit like finding a foot-long cockroach."
"I stopped and thought: 'What on Earth was that?' This amphipod was far bigger than I ever thought possible."
The strange animals were found using a large metal trap, which had been equipped with a camera, housed in sapphire glass to keep it safe from the high pressures of the deep sea.
Venice is sinking very slowly -only about two inches every 100 years. But worse, the Adriatic sea is rising around Venice as well. A proposed plan to save the Italian city involves “inflating” its porous foundation with sea water to raise the whole town about a foot. Forty billion gallons of water would need to be pumped! Read more about the plan at National Geographic News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: Jim Richardson/National Geographic)
I’ve lived by the ocean my whole life and have visited the ocean over and over, but I’ve never seen a wave from this angle or one that looks this amazing. Clark Little’s takes pictures like these inside of waves up to 40′ tall and the results are simply stunning. Don’t miss the link for more unbelievable shots.
David Neivandt, a professor at the University of Maine, and Alex Caddell, an undergraduate student there, have developed a golf ball made from the shells of lobsters.
Though biodegradable golf balls already exist, this is the first to be made with crushed lobster shells with a biodegradable binder and coating, creating value from waste material. “We’re using a byproduct of the lobster canning industry which is currently miserably underutilized — it ends up in a landfill,” Neivandt says. “We’re employing it in a value-added consumer product which hopefully has some cachet in the market.”
And that cachet doesn’t come with a higher price tag. Biodegradable golf balls that are now on the market retail for a little under $1 per ball. The raw materials for the lobster shell balls cost as little as 19 cents per ball.
So, will golf balls made of lobster shells be more likely to… end up in a trap? Not in the envisioned scenario. The balls were created specifically for use on cruise ships. Thus the emphasis on biodegradability.
This creature is called the Flower Hat Jellyfish. The name alone draws a picture! It is found off the coasts of Japan, Argentina, and Brazil. Its tentacles coil up when not in use, which makes them look like bouquets of flowers. The Flower Hat Jellyfish is just one of 14 of the most beautiful jellyfish known to man in a list from Environmental Graffiti. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
(Image credit: Wikimedia user KENPEI)
Animals that live underwater as so different they never fail to astound us. Marine invertebrates may flop like jelly when we see them on land, but in their own environment they can be as rigid as they need to be, thanks to the fluid skeletons they formed by compressing water within their organs. Read about how they work and see some gorgeous underwater pictures at Environmental Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Neil Barman)
Image: Peter Shearer/National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
I don’t know about you, but I’m utterly fascinated with weird and scary creatures that troll the deep ocean. Dark Roasted Blend has a fantastic post (as usual) filled with images of such creatures.
This one above is the Dragon Fish:
Light is so rare down there that its uniqueness is an allure, for mating, as well as a lure, for eating. Grammatostomias flagellibarba, ‘dragon fish’ to you and I, uses bioluminescence – biological light – mainly for the latter: EATING. Any deep, deep, deep swimmer that notices and becomes interested in a certain tiny flickering light will end up becoming caught by the dragon fish’s monstrously huge and needle-sharp toothed mouth. The light being a glowing lure at the end of a long, thin filament connected to the underside of the fish’s jaw.
If you look hard enough, even the most outlandish legends have a grain of truth somewhere. Reports from antiquity of sea monsters may be fantastic, but they describe what someone at least thought they saw at one time. Consider the sea monk, described in 1546 (left). It sure looks like someone drew it from their imagination. But then look at the sea creature called a Jenny Haniver (right). Read about this and other monsters that may now be explained scientifically. Link -via Gorilla Mask
See also: Baby Stingray
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The Census of Marine Life is a series of projects to find out exactly what lives in our oceans. The latest report is an inventory of microscopic sea creatures such as plankton and animals, some in a larval state. National Geographic has published pictures of five of these creatures, including this larval stage of a tube anemone, which is only one centimeter wide. Link
(image credit: Cheryl Clarke-Hopcroft/UAF/CMarZ)
Comments Off In this Discovery video, which has hit the tubes recently, you’ll see what is called an oarfish. Normally fish that look like this don’t rise anywhere near the surface of the sea. They say in the video that this critter is 5 to 10 meters long. If that is true, then it may account for the old mariner tales of sea serpents that were like fish, but huge and sporting tendrils. Aside from the giant squid, oarfish fits the bill perfectly, especially if it’s :
A huge oarfish was caught on camera in the Gulf of Mexico, giving scientists a rare glimpse of the bizarre fish in its native deep sea habitat. Researcher Mark Benfield describes the fish, a likely inspiration for the sea serpent myth.
via It’s Animals!
Despite the many opportunities for research in the oceans, the surfaces of those seas tend to get rough. Ships being tossed around tend to do less research, so in 1962 the Office of Naval Research helped to develop the Floating Instrument Platform (FLIP).
FLIP can be used in either a drifting or moored mode, based on the science requirements, and FLIP can remain on station in the vertical position for substantial periods of time. For research requiring a stationary rather than drifting platform, a deep moor capability has been developed.
This 350 foot long contraption is towed out to the open ocean, and flipped 90° to the vertical position to become a stable spar buoy. The 50 or so feet that juts above the waterline becomes the crew operations area, where research can be carried out in stable, calm conditions.
Link (Marine Physical Laboratory) Photo: Dept. of Navy
In the movie Avatar, there is a plant that disappears into the ground the instant it’s touched. The good news for those afflicted with Pandora Depression it that we have a similar plant organism, right here on Earth! The Sea Pen (a soft coral) expels water from its body when touched, so as to avoid being eaten.
nudibranch photos from Raymond's Flickr
WebEcoist rocks with an informative piece on a species commonly confused with a sea slug, and yes the name is pronounced how you think it is-
Nudibranchs’ unusual name comes from their distinctive breathing method: “naked” branchial (breathing) tubes on their backs which resemble branches or bushes. However, not all nudibranchs sport this unusual-looking breathing apparatus. While nudibranchs are commonly referred to as “sea slugs,” which is technically a valid title, it should be noted that not all sea slugs are nudibranchs.
There’s a new giant crack in the desert of Ethiopia, and some scientists think that it will eventually create a new ocean:
A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.
The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.
A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region’s future.
Marine biologist and blogger "WhySharksMatter" has created a list of four things everyone needs to know about sharks. Full of thought-provoking facts and cool pictures of sharks, this post will be interesting to the ocean lover in all of us.
“Human beings are better off with sharks than we are without sharks, and we are in danger of losing them forever… but you can help!”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by whysharksmatter.
Stop and think about this for a second: how does a zooplankton eat in such a vast ocean? Turns out, it’s not a trivial task: copepods, a type of zooplankton, filter a volume of water approximately 1 million times their own body volume to survive every day … and at their scale, water has the consistency of syrup.
Scientists discovered a particularly interesting "ambush feeding" technique dubbed the Lucky Luke effect:
“So far, we know of four ways in which zooplankters tackle the engineering feat of finding food in water which appears as thick as syrup. Our contribution has been to describe the mechanism at work for the last of these: How some copepods perform spectacularly precise and rapid surprise attacks on their single-cell prey after first having registered the prey by means of hydrodynamic signals,” explains Professor Thomas Kiørboe, DTU Aqua.
The solution for the ambush-feeding copepods builds on what Thomas Kiørboe calls the Lucky Luke effect:
“Our recordings show that the sub-mm copepods accelerate to a speed of 100 mm per second in a few milliseconds, while at the same time rotating perhaps 180 degrees. Like Lucky Luke who is faster than his shadow, the copepods jump forward so rapidly and with such precision that they, so to speak, shake the viscous boundary layer off, in that way getting close enough to their prey to capture it with their feeding limbs.”
The viscous boundary layer is the layer of water which the copepods pull with them when moving their bodies through the syrupy water. The larger the animals are and the faster they swim, the thinner it seems.
You’ve heard plenty about how the US beat the Soviets to the moon in 1969. There was another lesser-known exploratory scoop in January of 1960, when US Navy marine specialist Lieutenant Don Walsh and oceanographer Jacques Piccard climbed aboard the Trieste, a deep sea bathysphere designed by Piccard’s father Auguste Piccard, and dived to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It was the first time human beings traveled to the deepest part of the earth’s oceans -seven miles down!
At approximately four hours into their descent–several thousand feet above the sea floor–a sharp clang sounded through the pressure sphere and the vehicle shuddered violently. Once their wincing subsided, the men did what they could to inspect the craft and its condition. It seemed that the water pressure at this never-before-encountered depth–six tons per square inch–had cracked the outer pane of the lucite window. For the moment the vehicle itself remained watertight, but the damage was worrisome. The Trieste was outfitted with a few safety systems; for instance, the ballast doors were held closed by electromagnets, so in the event of electrical failure the doors would fall open and drop the ballast, causing the vehicle to rise to the surface. But such systems would be of no help to the men inside if the 1,000 atmospheres of pressure crushed their delicate passenger compartment. Moreover, no other vehicle in existence was capable of reaching such depths, which meant that if her float tank became compromised there was no chance of rescue. Nevertheless, the stalwart scientists opted to press on.
It was also the last time anyone dived that deep. Like the space race, once it had been done, no one saw the use in continuing to pay for such risky adventures. Read the entire story at Damn Interesting. Link
So how did we get here anyway? Call it evolution, call it luck, but really the best and brightest creatures above and below the waves found powerful allies. In some cases these are completely unexpected – predator and prey, friend and foe – but the ones that stuck it out and stayed friends through the toughest of times managed to make it to today’s oceans and seas.
Evolution alone is an amazing thing – but species that evolve together can be all the more spectacular, protecting, feeding and cleaning one another in incredible ways. Sharks pair with fish, fish with shrimp and shrimp with sea cucumbers and much much more. From boxing crabs that wield poisonous anemones as weapons to shrimp that scour the mouths of electric eels, here are seven of the most radical symbiotic relationships from the shallowest to the deepest waters of our world.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
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Two Burmese men were rescued from the waters off Horn Island, in the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea. They had been floating in a fish cooler for about 25 days! They were survivors from a crew of about 20 Thai and Burmese fishermen whose boat had broken up.
They told rescuers they were forced to crew a 10m-long Thai fishing boat that broke up about 200 nautical miles north of Australia, sources told The Courier-Mail.
As the wooden boat splintered into the ocean, the crew sent out distress signals but were ignored, the men told authorities.
The two survivors climbed into the icebox as other crew searched desperately for something to grab from the wreck.
They saw a Thai man floating past them in the ocean but were unable to help, they said.
It is understood the men managed to survive by drinking rain water that gathered at the bottom of the box and by eating pieces of fish that were also in the container.
Link -Thanks, Vit Peyr!
(image credit: Channel 7)
Apparently it’s called a frogfish, and while it looks sort of cute from afar, this thing is ugly… and fascinating. DarkRoastedBlend has a whole gallery of different types of frogfish, from the fluffy to the warty.
Link via DarkRoastedBlend
