Take three minutes to watch this BBC Four video of deep sea creatures. There are some truly bizarre ones here, including a transparent squid, a jellyfish with tentacles 40 meters long (!), and a crustacean that makes its home inside the purloined body of a jellyfish:
The deep sea is the last great frontier for naturalists. Who knows what bizarre stuff is down there?
h/t: SGM
Beautiful!
However, they indicate transparency as disguise?
I would think, transparency as “why waste resources on color where there is no light”?
I guess there is some light, diffusing from above, at least the squid had well developed eyes. Any shadow moving against the faint glow means a potential meal.
And, of course, many of these animals are themselves bioluminescent.
Does it depend on what depth we are at? http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/light_travel.html
Transparency is not just a lack of pigmentation. It requires that the refractive index of the cell membranes closely match that of the surrounding water; otherwise the result would be a murky translucency that scatters light instead of transmitting it. Snow lacks pigment but is far from transparent.
So it seems likely that transparency is the result of positive selection pressure for invisibility rather than mere lack of color.
That seems to settle the matter. Good explanation. +1
Marvellous, marvellous! This is one of the best ways to start the day. Hurrah for ‘marine snow’ too… that’s new to me.
This is one of the best things about getting older: actual scientific discovery! Used to be, I’d just hear the pronouncements “Nothing could live that deep / that cold / with no light.”
Then they used to say that about trenches too. And, I dunno if it is the dives of Cameron’s craft, but now they seem to be considered “deep oases” perhaps because they concentrate nutrients.
The reverse happens too, the hydrothermal vents were considered isolated oases. Which is apriori silly, their eukaryotes are still using oxygen as a sink for their energetics.
And lo, the latest news is that vent species are influenced by the same extinctions events and what not as the rest of the biosphere.*
*Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.
NB that crustacean does not live in a jellyfish, but in a salp, which is a chordate like you and me, Jerry. You read it on WEIT first, 20 months ago:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/hyperiid-amphipods-salps-and-alien/
“42!”
Oh, I though you were discussing what was inside Deep Thought.
New species for me in there, always a delight.
Q: Why are free swimming animals often more “beautiful” (symmetric, say) than bottom dwellers?
Or is my ‘statistics’ wrong? It is a selection effect at work in making these videos, naturally. But is it severe?
I don’t think there’s a symmetry difference…
I have this mental picture of *bottom dwellers* using camouflage that represents the rather mundane sea floor background. Plus digging in & relying on needle teeth in a large mouth to grab a bypassing meal. Plus an abundance of leg thingies. It all adds up to a waking nightmare. Not too pretty to look at compared with the ballet dancer free swimmers shown here.
On the other appendage… krill will never win bride-of-the-month in my opinion.
I also think Reynolds Number bears on this ~ if we look at microscopic free *swimmers* we will notice that they are as ugly as the *bottom dwellers* [by my standards] due to the ineffectiveness of streamlining at small scales in viscous fluids
I was blown away by the animal at 2:09, with a marvelous luminescent helix wrapping around its transparent body.
Check out this video from Bubble Vision (this is the long version). They are incredibly awesome. I’m not sure if I found them myself over a year ago accidentally or if you pointed me to them. Either way they are the best ocean-life channel I’ve come across.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ncUVddkK3Q
“Underwater videos from Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia, Fiji & Tonga”
They also have a FB page worth instantly liking: https://www.facebook.com/bubblevision?fref=ts
Spectacular creatures
A great coffee table book is “The Deep” (subtitled “The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss”) by Claire Nouvian. Magnificent photography of deep sea creatures.
Looks interesting. I went to Amazon’s bestseller’s list under “Marine Life”, “Oceanography”, and “Marine Biology” and “The Deep” ranks 6, 6, 8.
An excellent resource for exploring new books.
For example, here is the “Marine Life” section on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/14529/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_b_1_6_last
This book piqued my interest. The author appears to be the right combination of outstanding poet and scientist.
http://www.amazon.com/Into-Great-Silence-Discovery-Vanishing/dp/0807014354/ref=zg_bs_14529_3
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