Deep Ocean - Blog Posts
Aquanaut’s Holiday 2 (PS1 - 1999)
A deep sea friend: the blob sculpin. These are also known as "blobfish," which won the price for world's ugliest animal a few years back. Why doesn't it look like the blobfish you've seen on the internet? With bulbous noses and frowning lips and pink flesh? Those blobfish were dead and photographed after removing them from their seabed homes (1,600 to 9,200 ft deep) in the pacific. Reeling them up causes their bodies to rapidly expand because of the pressure change, which causes them to become pink and bloated. This blob sculpin rests peacefully on the ocean floor, staring up at the light of a submarine that illuminates it. Soon, it will swim off into the dark, hunting small crustaceans.
A Universe In The Ocean
“That was the most amazing, the most incredible moment of my life; as if I had been offered a trip to the moon … I thought of nothing else for months before it happened. Afterwards, for weeks I couldn’t talk about it without crying. I’m still not entirely over it … It was so beautiful and so intense, it changed me forever.”
Producer, journalist and film director of wildlife documentaries Claire Nouvain's speaking of her experience when she was invited on board the submersible Johnson Link-1 to travel down 1000 meters below the ocean in the Gulf of Maine part of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution.
From this life changing experience she set out to produce this beautiful book on the incredible universe that lies in the Abyss of our Oceans. A mind opening book of 220 mesmerizing photographs of marine life that has never seen before by most of us.
With an average of depth of 3800 Meters, the oceans offer 99 per cent of the space where life can develop on Earth. The Deep Sea occupies 85 per cent of this space, and thus forms the planets largest habitat. " And what do we know about it? Compared to what remains to be discovered practically nothing."
One of the major discoveries is that the depth is full of lights. There is no light from the surface, so creatures make their own, as many as 80-90 per cent of the animals are bio luminescent. Like fireflies they light themselves to collect food, to attract pray, to confuse predators and to signal potential mates.
Wow how fascinating is all this, am sure we won't find Nemo down here. This book will be a future classic, thank you Claire Nouvain and all the scientists for opening our eyes to the magic of this planet.
Enjoy xo
Sources,
www.thedeepbook.org
www.literaryreview.co.uk/robinson_05_07.html
EVERYONE LOOK AT THE VERY LARGE JELLYFISH :D
Giants lurk in the ocean’s mysterious midwaters.
While surveying the Gumdrop Seamount off the central California coast in 1998, MBARI staff spotted an unusual—and exceptionally large—jelly. This crimson creature was a full meter across. Unlike jellies that dwell near the ocean’s surface, this one didn’t have tentacles. Instead, a cluster of finger-like oral arms dangled beneath its bulky bell.
A closer look confirmed this was a new species—and one that had actually eluded our scientists five years earlier. Detailed video observations captured by our robotic submersibles helped MBARI researcher George Matsumoto and his colleagues in California and Japan formally describe this unusual jelly. They named it Tiburonia granrojo in honor of MBARI’s now-retired remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Tiburon, which was instrumental in documenting this delicate drifter in its natural environment.
Scientists have since spotted this jelly across the Pacific Ocean, from Baja California to Hawaii to Japan. That something so big remained undiscovered for so long shows how little we’ve explored the deep sea—and what more must be out there waiting to be found.