Deep-sea animals have evolved a variety of ways of moving through the water. Some are graceful. Some are improbable. But all are fascinating. This new video prepared by MBARI’s Video Lab staff shows just a few of these approaches to underwater locomotion.
MBARI Senior Research Technician Steve Fitzwater passed away on April 5, 2010. Steve worked in MBARI’s Chemical Sensors Group, developing new instruments and analytical techniques and organizing many important field experiments.
Suppose you’re walking along the beach and you see a jellyfish washed up on the sand. Then you see another and then another. It’s a jellyfish invasion! What do you do? Who do you call? If MBARI researcher Steve Haddock has his way, you’ll take some photos and maybe a few notes, and send them in to his new Jellywatch website (www.jellywatch.org), to share your discovery with the world.
With dimensions comparable to the Grand Canyon, it’s no surprise that Monterey Canyon harbors a variety of different seafloor habitats. But even on the flat, muddy floor of the canyon, animal communities vary considerably, according to a new paper by marine biologists Craig McClain and James Barry.
These days, when you can find your way through the woods using a cell phone or explore Mount Everest on your home computer, it’s hard to imagine that as many as 100,000 mountains on Earth have never been seen by human eyes, let alone explored. For all intents and purposes, these mountains are invisible, because they lie thousands of meters beneath the ocean waves.
On February 11, 2010, seventy five years after the dirigible USS Macon crashed into the Pacific Ocean, its crash site was added to the National Register of Historic Places. This underwater wreck was extensively documented using MBARI submersibles.
When most people think about the deep sea, they picture broad expanses of muddy seafloor. However, the majority of deep-sea animals, and perhaps the majority of all animals on Earth, live in the “deep pelagic zone”–the dark waters between the ocean surface and the seafloor.
Creeping slowly across the deep seafloor on long, spindly legs, giant sea spiders are found in many deep-sea areas. But, as with many deep-sea animals, we know very little about how sea spiders live. A recent paper by MBARI-affiliated researchers shows that sea spiders suck the juices out of deep-sea anemones.
Research programs at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) encompass the entire ocean, from the surface waters to the deep seafloor, and from the coastal zone to the open sea. The need to understand the ocean in all its complexity and variability drives MBARI's research and development efforts.