Subsea explorers, earlier this year, were credited with an enormous achievement for completing the deepest ever dive to discover the shipwrecked USS Johnston. The team from Caladan Oceanic found the sunken ship that sank during an intense 1944 naval battle. The conditions of the ship were impressively well-preserved with guns still pointing it where their enemies once stood, reports BBC.
Unexpected Discovery of Deepest Dwelling Squid; 19,000 Feet Below Sea Level
A few days before their success, the team explored another descent to the seafloor and ended up missing their mark by a few kilometers. Luckily, their efforts weren't in vain since they found something equally, if not more, astonishing than the shipwreck.
Footage of their excursion came in, and deep-sea researcher Alan Jamieson from the University of Western Australia rewound the clips from the two-person submersible that was polluted by American investor that founded Canada Oceanic, Victor Vescovo through 6,200 meters below the surface of the Philippine Trench and found a hazy yet familiar squid figure.
The figure cruised just above the seabed, roughly one a half kilometers deeper than any recorded squid sighting in the past. The team's findings are published in the journal Marine Biology, titled "Hadal cephalopods: first squid observation (Oegopsida, Magnapinnidae, Magnapinna sp.) and new records of finned octopods (Cirrata) at depths > 6000 m in the Philippine Trench".
Hurriedly cutting a clip of the footage and still images, Jamieson sent them to Mike Vecchione, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution. From the creature's outlines, Vecchione confirmed that it was a magnapinnidae or a bigfin squid due to its enormous fins protruding from the squid's mantles. Magnapinnidae is infamous for their innate mysteriousness.
Vecchione explains that these squids are weird since they drift out in the ocean with their arms spread out like long spaghetti-like extensions dangling underneath them. Microscopic suckers on the squid's filaments enable it to capture and trap its prey, reports Smithsonian Magazine.
The implication of Bigfin Squid Population in the Deep
However, according to Jamieson and Vecchione, the squid was a small one. They estimated that the squid's mantle measured roughly 10 centimeters long, roughly a third of the size of the largest recorded magnapinnidae suggesting that the squid caught on camera was juvenile.
The discovery is fascinating because it implies that squids, being apex predators, rely on complex ecological webs, and yet they can be found in such depths suggesting that other forms of life may lay somewhere deep to support the species, explains Bruce Robinsons, a deep-sea ecologist from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
If proven that bigfin squids commonly inhabit such depths at varying stages of life, it could make them susceptible to certain human activities. Robinsons explains that sediment plumes and disruption brought about by seafloor mining could have serious impacts on these populations. Footage of the USS Johnston wreck also had similar concerns. Although the trench was plowed 77 years ago, he says it looked as if it came down only yesterday.
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