The deep sea makes up more than 99% of the inhabitable volume of the planet. What do people know, think, or feel about it? How can we best study it and communicate our results? With this blog I hope to bring current research on the ocean and deep-sea more into the mainstream.
This region is presented in a variety of ways by the media. A positive example is the stunning book The Deep. This surprise best-seller was a labor of love put together by Claire Nouvian after she became entranced by the deep.
Other examples may be less inspiring (and probably more typical). An article in WIRED magazine a couple years ago attempted to educate people about “What’s down there.” They highlighted factoids mainly about dolphins, turtles, seals, whales, and humans –– charismatic air-breathing vertebrates that make brief forays into the deep, but which can’t truly be considered inhabitants.
The article was accompanied by a fanciful illustration (below, left) that looks nothing like our currently-held view of deep-sea inhabitants (one example, below at right).
If they had done some more research, they might have discovered that the truth about the deep-sea really is stranger than anything they could have dreamed up. It is full of goggle-eyed squids, silicon-based “buckyballs” (radiolarians), forty-meter-long curtains of stinging death (siphonophores), and glowing jellies that propel themselves with eyelash-like paddles (ctenophores). These invertebrate predators dominate deep-sea ecosystems but observing them requires NASA-like efforts and technology.
In a way, by completely missing the boat, the article perfectly illustrated the point: we’ve barely scratched the surface in getting the public and the media to understand the deep ocean’s inhabitants.
-Steve
* Links to the WIRED article and the Johnsen article
Thanks for expanding our awareness of life so alien to us landlubbers. Personally, I think the dumbo octopus (Grimpoteuthis) is pretty cool. I hope we can learn more about benthic species before fishing pressure finds its way to them.
I fully support your effort to education us about the deep sea creatures. I’m a water baby and have spent years under the surface of the sea but nothing in that realm compares to these deep sea life forms. I liken them to alien life forms that we may one day discover in the seas on the moons of Jupiter. But before we venture out there, we need to learn more about the life in our own seas.
I loved your article and it’s so timely! Just this past weekend, the science channel had something about our explorations into the deep, vast unknown. The “sulphur cones” (forgive my ignorance), we used to think nothing could grow around them, since they emit sulphur constantly and the water is boiling hot around them, when in reality they’re surrounded by life. All sorts of plants and creatures, a real zoo. This was a real treat, to think that nothing could survive in Venus, for example. Are we completely sure? I guess not.
Thank you so much for your wonderful article!
I appreciate your quest to help us all explore the deep, outside the mainstream and our misconceptions. I can’t wait!
I love how scientists name everything “buckyballs”
@Jay — ;^) I’m with you on the buzzwords, but for once it’s not hyperbole… You should see these things. [external image] I guess I could have called them “Sputniks”.
The basic building block of the spherical lattice is hexagonal/triangular, rather than pentagonal as in some fullerenes, but structurally they are closer (~identical) to Fuller’s original geodesic domes.
Maybe I’ll post about them at some point down the road.
I think it’s great that you’re pointing out misconceptions such as what was published in this highly distributed magazine. People need to get all the facts before they print. I remember hearing something about a huge percentage of the sea that we haven’t even discovered (visited) yet I think it was more than half). Do you know what the percentage is now?
@sglasson — Good question. Speaking of getting the facts before writing, I don’t know the exact percentage of the sea that has been explored. It partly depends on definitions. A lot of people think of the deep sea as just being the bottom, but there is vastly more living space up in the water-column. For the portion of the bottom we’ve actually laid eyes on, the number I’ve heard is 0.5% (1/200th or half a percent, not half), and for the water column it must be at most 100x less than that. In short: not much. EDIT: just read the 0.5% as an estimate in Craig McClain’s excellent review of seamount biology