2 days ago
This Elusive Antarctic Squid Was Seen for the First Time
The deep-sea environs of the Earth's poles are home to mysterious ocean creatures: giant sea spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, phantom jellyfish. Finding and identifying these animals can be difficult, however; some are known only because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the bellies of seabirds. But on Christmas Day last year, the crew of the R/V Falkor (Too), the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel, caught sight of a creature never before seen alive.
The team had planned to deploy its remotely operated vehicle, SuBastian, in a site known as the Powell Basin, but the movement of ice blocks forced the group to explore the region's outer edges instead.
When the submersible dropped 7,000 feet, the team unexpectedly spotted a shadow through the live feed, which turned out to be an Antarctic gonate squid, a rare species of cephalopod, three feet long and releasing a green cloud of ink.
'It was a beautiful squid,' said Andrew Thurber, a deep-sea researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was aboard the vessel. 'You see beauty all the time in the deep ocean, and this was just one classic example of it.'
No Antarctic gonate squid had ever been seen alive before, as far as the team was aware. They followed it for a couple of minutes and made sure to record it on video, capturing the creature's red coloration and white spots.
'Videos like this get me really excited,' said Linsey Sala, a museum scientist who manages the pelagic invertebrate collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and was not involved in the expedition. Discoveries of species like this 'can be really informative to how they live life at great depths,' Ms. Sala said. Unidentified specimens might be sitting in collections around the world, she added, in which case the video footage could be helpful in revealing what they are.
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