Deep in the Indian Ocean is home to some very strange sea life-even one that looks like a kite flying in the underwater currents. Explorers captured a video of this gelatinous creature in a recent dive to the Java Trench, the bottommost part of the Indian Ocean. This dive was one of many in the Five Deeps Expedition, during which the crew aimed to reach the deepest part of all five of the world's oceans.
"We were just watching the video back and saw the thing come out of the darkness," said Alan Jamieson, the chief scientist on the expedition and a senior lecturer at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom "It drifted right towards the camera... and then drifted off again."
After a good search, Jamieson found a group in Japan that had described something similar about 20 years ago-a species of stalked ascidian or sea squirt. But there were significant differences between the newly found creature and the one described in the writing-the latter had filaments coming off the top of its head, whereas this one doesn't, he said. There's a "high probability" of this being a new species, since there's no record of such a creature that far down at over 6,500 meters or 21,300 feet he said.
"This creature likely anchors itself to the seafloor with its long tentacle, perhaps to keep still in a seismically active seafloor," he said. Trenches are "seismically active" because they are dips on the seafloor where one tectonic plate is pushed beneath another. As for why the tentacle is so long, Jamieson suggested it might help the creature filter feed up to 3.3 feet above the seafloor.
Of all three of the oceans, the Indian Ocean seems to be the one with the heaviest amount of sea life, Vescovo said. But, it's also the one that's very undersampled. There's "hardly any record at all," of the creatures down there, Jamieson added. The members of the research group hope to analyze some of the videos and photos they took down in the depths of our world and publish some findings about their research. In addition, their dives are being filmed for a Discovery Channel documentary series set to air toward the end of the year.
The next stop, in two weeks, is the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest part of any of the oceans. This trench is the only one that has been explored by humans-but only twice before, Vescovo said. US Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard first dove down to the trench back in 1960 and Canadian explorer and filmmaker James Cameron set the record for going the deepest in 2012.
