Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Rob and Joe discuss the recent discovery of a strange new deep-water predator and highlight some of the various weird, wild and downright gnarly hunters that haunt the deepest, darkest depths of Earth’s oceans.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're going to be starting a discussion about animal life in the deepest parts of the ocean, specifically the deep ocean's predators, looking at what it takes to be an active hunter in the deep. And I thought a good place to start off with this series would be the story that inspired me to look at this topic, and that was the discovery last year of a new species known as Delsabella common chaka. You may have seen stories about this. It was covered in some popular press, but the finding was described in a November twenty twenty four paper published in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity by Johanna Weston, Carolina Gonzales, Reuben Escribano, and Osvaldo Uloa, and the paper was called a new large predator Amphibida useyrite hidden at Haitl depths of the Atacama Trench. Now, one of the things that really got my attention when I was first reading about this was simply what this animal looks like. We'll get to a physical description of it in just a minute. But the other thing that I thought was really interesting is the ecological question how an animal like this makes its living in such an environment, what it takes to be a predator so far down in the ocean. And we'll be continuing to explore that question as we as we move on in the series. So the authors of this paper included scientists affiliated with the Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in the United States and the Instituto millenniody Oceanographia, which is based at the Universidad des Concepcion in Chile. Now, again, this paper was marking the discovery of a new species of oceanic predator, and the name they gave to the new predator was del Sibella Kemanchaka. And this is interesting for a number of reasons. I'll do a full etymology in just a minute here, but especially I wanted to draw attention to the species name Kemanchaka, which I saw in several sources was derived from an Andean language word, a word apparently in several of the Indian languages meaning darkness, but apparently it has multiple meanings. So kemanchaka also refers, according to the authors of this paper, to quote a dense, low coastal fog that forms by the Atacama Desert and moves inland. Kamanchakas was also the name given to some of the littoral inhabitants of this desertic region, so mysterious swirling ideas. There a name that means fog, a kind of fog that rolls in, rolls in around the desert. And then also darkness itself. Now why would the species be named darkness, Well, it's because Dulcibella kim and Chaka was discovered at a depth of almost eight thousand meters in a place called the Atacama Trench. This is a deep ocean trench basically following the contour off the coast of South America from perud Icile and it's roughly one hundred and sixty kilometers or about one hundred miles off shore for most of its length. And as we will probably continue to come back to in this series, there are a lot of interesting things about this sort of environment. Deep ocean trenches, sometimes called the Hadle zone, can function kind of like islands do in biogeography. They create a pocket of environmental conditions surrounded on all sides by much different conditions where the ocean is less deep all around them. Unless the pressure is different, the temperature is different. And thus in these in these deep deep zones surrounded by the less deep deep zones, they can evolve unique isolated organisms and biological relationships. So ocean trenches are in many ways like islands inverted, but with unique features. For example, the kind of ecosystem that's possible in a deep ocean trench is based in part on what happens in the ocean above it, like what kind of biological productivity takes place up there, and by consequence, what kind and quantities of goodies rain down into the trench from above. I was thinking about it, and you could almost kind of compare that environmental factor to something like soil quality or water conditions on a terrestrial island environment.
Yeah. Yeah, often refer to does the marine snow? I think of it as kind of like the gray rainfall of little pieces of flesh.
The blessed rot that sustains us all. And in addition to these interesting general qualities that the Autocoma Trench itself is especially interesting and unique because of its relative isolation from other deep ocean trenches. So to read from the paper here, the authors say, quote the Hatel zone, or the deepest forty five percent of the ocean from six thousand to eleven thousand meters, has high levels of undiscovered biodiversity. Most Hatel features are trenches formed at the subduction zone between tectonic plates and shaped by a unique suite of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. The Autocoma Trench, the southern sector of the Peru Chile Trench, is one of the most geographically isolated Hatel features and is situated below eutrophic surface waters and cara rised by high sediment loads. The Atakoma Trench is known to host a highly distinctive faunel community driven by a combination of these isolating factors. So it's not just the things that are true of these these deep trench environments, the Hatel zones around the world, but also that there's something kind of special about this one, that it's especially isolated, that it's got these productive waters above it, and so it gives rise to a lot of unique and fascinating biology.
Kind of a Galapagos of the deep, perhaps to play with that island comparison.
Now, just a side note here because it connected to something we've talked about before. The authors give a nod to important early work done in characterizing hadel fauna in the nineteen sixties by expeditions of the First of all, they mentioned the RV academic Corchetov, but then they also mentioned the r V el Tanan. Yeah, we talked about some deep otion surveys by the Eltannan in a series we did about sort of anomalous imagery taken underwater that people ended up saying had to be UFOs or some kind of technology from the future or Atlantis or anything like that. In this case, the thing was the el tannin quote antenna. Many people have said, oh, yeah, this has to be a piece of alien technology because it looks like a radar array with these aerials coming up. In fact, it is almost definitely a carnivorous sponge.
Yeah, deep sea carnivorous sponge. Yeah. So that's a fun episode to go back and listen to if you want to lean more into this weird world of misinterpretation of confusing visual data.
So coming back to this newly discovered species, the new species is an amphipod now amphipods are animals belonging to the order Amphipida, which are crustaceans found in both marine and freshwater environments, usually described as having laterally compressed bodies, so you can think of them as taller than they are wide, maybe like somebody put them in a vice and squeeze their sides in. I've seen a number of sources describe amphipods as looking shrimp like, and that does describe some of them. Confusingly, shrimp are not amphipods, but a lot of apipods do look shrimp like, though not all of them. Some of them look more like weird fantasy insects. For example, just one I found that I thought was very visually striking. If you want a good little freak out, look up the amphipod genus Epimeria epi me r Ia with a few of the guys in this genus. I get strong notes of the toxic jungle from NAUSICAA.
Absolutely, and this one image that you shared in our outline here, in particular, I found extra grotesque because if I didn't know better, I would dismiss this image as that sort of horrifying AI generated monster imagery that you see where are these days? You know, the sort of thing that is in and of itself unnerving and disturbing. But I've also swiftly conditioned myself to abhor them all the more because I know they're not the product of a human mind or a human imagination. So just looking at this image makes my stomach churn in weird ways, and I end up not really knowing how I feel about it. But of course this is not an AI generated monstrosity. This isn't an actual denizen of the natural world.
I wonder if everybody has the same experience I do, so I don't. Of course, I don't personally use Facebook these days, but I still have an account specifically to check our work, you know, our work page every now and then, and every time I log in there, literally my entire news feed on there is just like AI generated fake images of things and saying like new beasts discovered in whatever, And you know, it's almost like they're like they're trying to trick us into doing an episode on this new beast discovered as so AI garbage. That's like a fake image of some monster in a jungle.
Yeah, yeah, I don't like it.
I mean, in a way. I appreciate it because it's so distasteful. I'm not even tempted to scroll the news feed for a few seconds. I just immediately navigate away.
But yeah, there's currently a sameness to so much of it, and I guess I should appreciate that sameness. Swile it's still there. If it gets harder to tell them, even harder to classify them and categorize them as AI generated things, then we're even We're in even more troubling waters.
Yeah, but back to real troubling waters, right.
So.
Amphipods can be found in all over the place, many habitats. They take many different forms. It seems the majority of amphipods are scavengers. They eat decomposing organisms or whatever little bits of organic detritis they come across. The new species described in this paper, however, is an active predator. According to the authors, it is the first large active predator ever found this deep in the Atacoma Trench. Again, it was the individuals collected here. We're at like seventy nine hundred meters down. All the other amphipods previously identified in this area have been scavengers. Though predatory amphipods have been found in other ocean trenches on Earth. So the specimens here were collected by a deep sea vehicle operated by Chile's Integrated Deep Ocean Observing System in twenty twenty three, there was like a they call it like a lander vehicle. So it's like a thing that can go down and collect collect specimens, collect baited traps and things like that. And according to morphological and genetic analysis, this new predator is not only a newly discovered species, but a newly discovered genus. And here's where I wanted to get back to both the etymology of the genus and species name, but to a kind of interesting side note on taxonomic frustration. So the authors originally tried to give this animal the genus name Dulcinea, which is spelled d u l c i n e A Dulcinea, after the name of a character from don Quixote.
Yes, yes, Robert Doolay would have loved this, this choice in genus name because the lyrics to don Quixote the man a Lamacha musical. Rather, it goes like, you know, Dulcinea, dulcinea, I see heaven when I see the Dulcinea.
Okay, I don't know that one. It's a great musical, Okay, I'll look it up. I've heard of it before, obviously, but yeah, never, I've never seen it or listen. But this this apparently, and so like trying to name this genus after don Quixote was apparently following a pre existing convention by which several other genera of deep sea amphipods were named after characters from Servantes. So I've never read don Quixote myself, so I didn't know who this character was, and I was curious to look it up. The character is called Dulcinea del Toboso and is a character that is fictional or maybe better to say, imaginary, within the narrative of the novel. So, the character don Quixote is, you know, like a knight errant, and he thinks he must have a lady to serve. So the way I read it summarized is that he looks at a peasant girl and then he kind of imagines a version of her as this high born princess who is impossibly perfect and worthy of his lance in every way, and so he thinks of her as the ultimate all time milady. And this character in his head he names Dulcinea del toboso. Dulcinea derived from like dulce, the Latin word for sweet, So this name would mean a superlative sweetness. And so, together with what I already mentioned about the species name cumunchaka meaning darkness, darkness in several indigenous and in languages, this predatory amphipod's name basically means sweet darkness. It's like the name of a necromancer's pet. And so this is just even the name Dulcinea darkness. That sounds pretty great. That's got some great noir vibes to it. Oh yeah, it's like that saccharin goth thing. There's a lot of that, a lot of that going on. And so this is still basically what the animal is named. But remember I was gonna mention taxonomic frustrations. So they were trying to name the genus Dulcinea, but it turned out that name had already been assigned to a genus of Coleoptera, I mean beatles, a genus of beetles a long time ago, I think over one hundred years ago. I don't even know if that genus name is even used anymore, but it had been assigned sometime in the past, and according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, you cannot reuse names, so they had to change the name. They changed it to Dulcibella, also a nickname derived from the word for sweet or weakness, also basically meaning milady. And so now we end up with dulcibella common chaka. Still, I think you can still say sweet darkness.
By the way, some of you might have noticed that I said dulcinea earlier and not dulcinea. In the musical, they say dulcinea, so I believe dulcinea is correct. So I don't know. This is not a show that is exclusively about musicals, though, so those are you more familiar with Mana la mancha, perhaps you can write it about it.
I think we also are bound to be forgiving of pronunciation differences.
I think Peter O'Toole sings it dulcinea in the nineteen seventy two adaptation of the musical. But we're not talking about Peter o'tool We're talking about the deep ocean.
Right, So I think it's finally time to talk about the physical form of this creature. So Rob, I've attached a photo for you to look at in the outline here. Again, folks at home, if you want to look it up yourselves, you can google Dulcabella kamon Chaka. The first thing I have to acknowledge is what many other articles have already pointed out. There is some significant overlap with the appearance of the face hugger from Alien. Not so much in body form, it's not shaped like a face hugger, but in color and texture. I think we're almost perfectly there. The pale white and off white, slimy, bumpy surface in some places looks kind of like a shrimp covered in white goo. In other places looks like a translucent white skin stretched over a bumpy landscape of I got some things in there that look like vertebrae, little leg joints and knobs that were just made to wriggle and writhe. It is monstrously face huggery in multiple ways, not in body shape, but otherwise. Yes.
The texture, the apparent texture here reminds me of various images I've seen of like three D printed scaffolding for like vatgrown organs, and like you know, it has that kind of appear. It's kind of like if you three D printed a shrimp and you really didn't want to eat it. It also kind of has a zoidberg ye look to it, with its various mouth parts. It looks almost like it has like cuthulhuoid tentacles or something, So it has a real kind of sinister vibe.
I have to say. Now, there's another thing that is both creepy and funny about it, which is not so much about the organism itself, but about how I misunderstood it when I was first looking at this picture. Because one way I would have initially described this is it's like a cavefish xenomor of shrimp dog with a broom for a face. Because there is what I first interpreted to be like a huge, long, bristly white beard shooting straight out of the animal's head. But here's the thing on the right side of the image. There, rob that is not the animal's head. I was looking at it backwards. The head is on the left. So an expert, you know, somebody who knows amphipod biology, probably would not have made this mistake. But just to add to the list of weird things about it for the lay observer, the backside doubles as a kind of ghostly veiled face and again a little, you said, Cathu Lewy. I can see that because the way you know, mind flavors are rendered with like all the tentacles coming out of the face. When you look at its backside as its head, which really I think many observers would be strongly inclined to do, it's got all this stuff coming out of the front and that that's actually the back.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
So it's even weirder when you look at it the right way around because its head is up here, not down there. Wow.
So this specimen we're looking at here is a little less than four centimeters long. And remember this does qualify as a large predator for its environment. There was a part of the paper I want to read where the authors describe its characteristic body features, because it ends up that it's like this list of weird anatomical terms that flow together like a kind of horrible poetry. So they describe it as follows, a smooth dorsal body, twelve spines on the outer maxilla, one plate, subsimilar and strongly subcelate nathopods with broad carpus lobes. The periopods three and four Dactyli are zero point forty five x of the respective propodus and periopods five to seven dactili are zero point six x, a distal spiniform process on the peduncle of Europod one and an elongated but weakly cleft telson and that al It's like, I don't know, sexy or something.
It is sexy or something. Yes, the peduncle of europod one.
I love it, but again you might not guess by looking at it. One of the things that distinguishes this is that for its environment, this is a fast moving animal, a fast moving predator of the deep ocean, not an ambling seafloor scrubber, but an active predator that chases down prey. Typically it's prey being other amphipods. You might remember from the poetry passage the nathopods that spelled g n A t h opods. These are raptorial front appendages that the animals used to hunt. So they'll dart through the water and snatch the smaller cousins with these fore claws that looks you can kind of imagine like the clause of a praying mantis. You know, these folding fore claws that can grab and then feed prey toward the mouth.
Strong elements of JABBERWOCKI I want to say to all of the language involved in this description, Yeah, yeah, I feel like the nathopods surely Outgrabe at one point or another.
Yes, yes, I just had to look up the poem. I couldn't remember the exact phrasing, but I see this and I see sly the toes. But anyway, I just thought this was so interesting looking at animals like this and that we're still discovering these types of these animals, these predators, because it reminds us how relatively little we know about these extremely deep environments, especially super deep like the Hadel Zone the deep ocean trenches. And one thing that some authors writing about this discovery mentioned is that there's actually a lot that studying the fauna of the Hadel Zone could teach us about how to look for life elsewhere in the Solar System, like on subsurface oceans, on moons like Europa.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, the idea of looking into dark, lightless oceans. We have dark, lightless regions of our own ocean. And indeed, one thing that becomes clear when you start reading more about specific organisms is that we know more than we ever have regarding these depths but there is still so much mystery, and you know, it's just there are these are places that are hard to get to, hard to get eyes down there, you know, be they organic or mechanical. And we've discussed in the past the complications that are involved in bringing any kind of physical specimens up from the deep. They may you know, explode and be damaged in ways that don't apply as much to other organisms you might collect. Many of these are very delicate as well.
Yeah, absolutely true. So there are a lot of challenges to studying the biology and ecology of the deep ocean, but there is a lot of interesting stuff we know, and that's what we want to look at in the series, specifically again focused on predators. What are preor is doing down there, What challenges to predators in the deep deep ocean face, and how do they make a living?
Yeah? Yeah, so first and foremost we have to talk just briefly, I think about temperature and pressure. We've discussed the challenges of temperature and pressure and the deep ocean before and stuff to blow your mind. But we're talking about depths where sunlight does not reach and so too, the sun's heat does not quite reach it. Geothermal sources of heat acide. It's a realm of pretty chilling waters, and to be on the ocean floor is to feel the pressure of the water column on your back and upon all sides of you at once. Actually, the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is more than a thousand times that of the pressure at sea level. And meanwhile, the temperature down there is I've read on the order of like one to four degrees celsius or thirty four to thirty nine degrees fahrenheit.
So an extreme environment, and organisms that want to adapt or evolve to survive there need to you need to make some pretty radical investments.
That's right now. One thing that's interesting about the deep ocean is that it may at times seem like a contradiction. You know, it may seem like a contradictory realm because, on one hand, is pointed out by for example, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, it is a biologically diverse realm and one that ultimately constitutes ninety five percent of the Earth's living environment. If you consider the hard surface of a planet to be its core environment, so you know, not just talking about the surface that we know, but also the seafloor is being like the rocky surface, then the ethhotic zone. The dark ocean is the majority of the Earth. It's the realm. Alien observers might, by some metric consider the default tearan environment, you know, like on the rocky surface, covered by like crushing amounts of water and out reach of sunlight.
Yeah, so like terrestrial animals by comparison, are just the thing is living on certain mountaintops. That's right.
The dark ocean entails the mesopo logic, the bathop logic, and the abyssopalalgic and the deepest hatopelagic zone, which is also known as the hatal zone. And again in the darkness here there is diversity, there is life.
But that doesn't mean life there is easy, and in many ways in the deep ocean, animals may face some challenges that you might not think of, not just the cold and the darkness and the pressure, but maybe resource challenges.
That's right. As pointed out by the likes of the NOAA, the deep ocean is a kind of food desert. Sunlight does not reach down to power photosynthesis, and so with the exception of chemosynthetic communities masked in close proximity around hydrothermal vents. These zones suffer from foods and this results in an overall lack of density in organisms. The main food sources that creatures in this region are going to depend on, They're going to depend on predation among fellow inhabitants. And then on the other hand, you also have the periodic megafeasts that occur when you have whale fall, when you have a particularly large organism that has died or is killed in the waters above and sinks down steadily towards the bottom. Now coming back to the Hadal zone specifically, here again the absolute deepest of the dark ocean realms. We're talking three point seven to six point eight miles or six to eleven kilometers beneath the waves. We're also talking about something that's a little different from the idea of just like expansive deserts of depth. We're talking again about long, narrow, topographic v shaped depressions. And so you might well wonder, okay, well, given there comparatively limited horizontal footprint, how often are there going to be sufficient falls, such as a whale fall of some sort to feed the Hatel zone. Again, if we were to think of it in terms of like the surface world. Imagine you know a topography and there's like a narrow canyon and they are creatures that live at the bottom of that canyon. How often is a big old condor or vulture going to fall out of the sky and feed them, right? So that's what I was, like, a long shot, Yeah, yeah, I mean, it turns out maybe it's not that actually that big of a big of a deal, But that was my question that it was in my head, and that's what led me to look around, and indeed I found a paper by a desk Gupta at All from twenty twenty four titled Depth and Predation Regulate Consumption of Dolphin carcasses in the Hadel Zone. This is from Deep Sea Research Part one Oceanographic Research papers. So they point out that we've known about whale flight and smaller sized food falls for more than three decades, and with that the realization that these are important food sources for particularly for the deep kicking up temporary and something I mean also kind of not so temporary, as we'll discuss sea floor environments around the bounty. But such events in the Hadal zone were largely unknown and unstudied. So what did the researchers here decide to do. They said, well, let's orchestrate a couple of them. Let's drop some dead dolphins down a couple of trenches and watch and see what happens.
Oh okay, so this wouldn't be something that is totally artificial, like it never happens in nature. It's just rare enough that we know it's hard to like come across this naturally, right.
And I want to stress that the authors here that they point out that whale falls are actually thought to occur with relative frequency in the deep ocean. So my question seems to largely just be dismissed, like it just it occurs, and there's no reason to think that it's especially rare. I think we have to remember that. Take the Mariana Trench for example. Yes, it's narrow compared to the expanse of ocean around it, but we're still talking about a feature that's five hundred miles long with an average width of about forty three miles. But still no hatl whale falls had ever been recorded. So that's why in twenty twenty one, the researchers dunked a pair of Fraser's dolphins, one down the Mariana Trench and the other down the Philippine Basin.
Okay, so the reason that was not recorded before is not because it doesn't happen, but because it's our limited ability to look for it. Naturally happened exactly. Yeah.
Now I want to feature a little reminder here about sort of the phases. There are generally four phases of whale fall that are recognized by scientists. So, first of all, what happens again dead whale of one size or another sinks to the bottom and is now on the bottom of the ocean, some up through another The first stage is the mobile scavenger stage. Scavengers or necrophages arrive for the soft tissues, and the resulting feast can last for months or even over a year. It's going to ultimately depend on the exact environment and the size of the bounty. And one thing that is kind of fun to do is to think about these two in terms of you know, of a human scenario. Imagine prospectors discovering gold, oil, or some other desired resource and are previously unoccupied or scarcely occupied area. What sort of stages of development and then abandonment end up occurring. Okay, cool, okay. So first the mobile scavengers come. Then phase two is the enriched mint opportunist stage. This is when we get heterotrophic fauna arriving to colonize the surrounding sediments which are now infused with organics from the whalefall as well as the exposed bones of the whale. And this period can last months or even years. The third phase is the breakdown phase. This is when we have sulfophilic bacteria anaerobically breaking down the lipids embedded in the bones. This results in bacterial mats that provide sustenance for the various critters and this can take fifty to even one hundred years.
Wow.
And then the final stage is the reef stage. This is when only minerals remain, creating a hard substrate for filter feeders such as deep sea sponges.
And we've discussed before how just a just a hard surface raised up off of the seafloor is actually something that can be at a premium in the ocean.
That's right, and this is one way that new solid outcroppings can be created in the long run. So again coming back to this, twenty twenty one research project. They dropped two dolphin carcasses, one down each trench, and then they used a man submersible to observe the initial phases of the whale fall. So nine dives were conducted over a period of eighty six days for the Philippine Basin and fifty days for the Mariana Trench. Now, the dolphins involved here are quite small by whale standards, so we're not talking this ultimately the same time frame as cited previously here, but the stages are still in play, and the researchers observed both of the initial stages, which we have to also point out do tend to overlap in general and overlapped here as well. So there's not a hard cutof there's nobody's blowing a whistle and saying, all right, that's it, opportunistic scavengers, get out of here. We got the next crew coming in. So what they observed with phase one they had hatl amphipods, which we were just talking about an example of that, as well as snail fish. These were found occurring at the whale drop in the Philippine Basin, and then just hadle amphipods. No snailfish at the Mariana Trench drop. So without the predatory snail fish in action, the scavengers, the scavenging amphipods at the Mariana Trench location, they were able to work faster, uninterrupted in their feeding, and consume most of the soft tissue in just a matter of days.
Ah okay, that's interesting. Yeah, So the presence of secondary predators complicates how the initial resources are consumed. So the way the dolphin falls down and you've got these amphipods, you know, stripping, stripping the bones, eating all the soft tissue, But then you also could have predators there that limit the amphipod's ability to quickly consume the carcass.
Right, And that's exactly how it seemed to go down at the Philippine Basin site, where the scavengers ended up having to take a ten day feeding break to avoid the snailfish. Now they observe that the second stage only attracted a few grazing organisms and quote the dispersed organic matter and limited lipid content in the dolphin bones were likely insufficient to sustain an active grazing community or the chemosynthetic community that typically typically follows. So larger whales would presumably sustain larger environments for longer. But one of the key ideas presented by the researchers here is that the exact shape and timeframe of a given whale fall is going to depend not only on the animals that sinks to, the depths, the size of the carcass, but also on the depth that it sinks to. You know, the exact location, and you know what sort of like local deep ocean environment is in play.
Oh well, that totally makes sense. The same way if you like, well, i mean just on the surface, if you drop a dead animal somewhere, what happens to it afterwards would depend not only on what kind of the food quality of that dead animal is, but where you put it. So, you know, take a dead cow and you put it in the middle of the desert, something different is going to happen to it than if you take that same dead cow and you put it, you know, in the middle of the forest.
It comes back to our example of the islands. If a large condor, let's say, falls dead out of the air and it lands on this island, and it lands on this island, like different things are likely going to eat it. Coconut crabs on one island, Komodo dragons on another, rats on yet another island.
Yeah, that's right, though I guess actually a better comparison than what I said would be would be different versions of a similar ecosystem, because here they're both talking about they're dropping it into the Hadel Zone, So it would be like dropping it into two different forests in different places on the Earth, so similar kind of environments, but still different local conditions and ecology.
So again, outside of the vents like these and hydrothermal vent communities, there's just a lot of distance down there in the dark ocean, especially when you get into like the Hadel Zone. And we see that in the various ways that the denizens of the deep live their lives in terms of reproduction, but also in terms of how predators conducted their business, how they seek out their prey or allow their prey sometimes to find them, or position themselves in just the right place to where they will run into the things they want to eat.
And so as we saw in the last example, sometimes that might mean not just chasing after the thing you want to eat, but going to where the thing you want to eat wants to eat.
Is right right, And so for the remainder of this episode, I wanted to talk about one example of a predator of the deep of the deep ocean in general, but also as we'll get into seemingly of the hadel zone as well, and that is the general category of deep sea sciphonophores. Now, we've talked about siphonophores on the show before, and I know I've talked about easily the most famous sciphonophoor on Adam alias Stupendium before that is the Portuguese Man o War. This is not only the most famous siphono four, it was the first described by science in seventeen fifty eight and also essentially the only sciphono four with a common name.
I mean, how often do you get to bring up a siphonophoor in conversation?
Yeah, because I mean, the thing about the Portuguese Man of War is that it is a siphonofour that lives at the surface of the water. It doesn't get any closer to us unless it, you know, gets washed up on the beach, as they may do, or if it were to actually crawl up and like enter our houses or something, which they're not doing. But yeah, siphonophores are just so endlessly weird and wonderful. They're hydrozoans, and they are so. They are aquatic invertebrates, but they are not jellyfish. They are not sea jellies. And the wild thing is they are not even individual organisms, but are rather colonial organisms made up of genetically identical but highly specialized polyps. So what you might mistake for a single organism's reproductive system with one of these critters you know, say, you know, is a like a digestive system, or an arm or a flotation bladder. Each of these is in fact an individual zooid. So each zooid is a multicellular animal unto itself that exists as part of a colonial hole, each comprising an essential system of that whole. So to employ an imperfect comparison here, if you know voltron, Voltron is a large mech mecha robot that is made out of smaller mecha lion robots, you know, that are piloted by humans. And except in this situation, imagine that the lions that form our voltron cannot exist separate from the hole. They cannot live on their own, and in fact are not just forming the legs and the arms and the torso in the head, but are forming things like the reproductive system, the vultron, digestive system and so forth. And generally the layout you'll see with one of these siphonophores is you'll have a section called the neumataphor, which provides buoyancy, and this is very obvious with the Portuguese Man of War. Then you have the nectosome, which is related to swimming, and the siphosome, which is related to feeding, reproductive capabilities, and defense. And they may seem like floaty and docile that like, and especially this is the case this may have seen the case with the Portuguese Man of War because they are kind of tossed about by the wind and the sea and are taken to certain extents, you know, where the sea is sending them. But siphino forests in general, they are predatory carnivores, and they are they're active predatory carnivores in their own peculiar way.
It's actually a more horrify kind of predation and even than we're used to. You think a bit more like the blob.
Yeah, yeah, and it's like that level of just like you look at the body layout of one of these, and I guess they have more of a body layout than the blob, but it's still vastly inhuman and non mammalion non vertebrate, and even so different from the you know, invertebrate worlds of other animals. You can't just turn it around and say, oh, well that's the head and now it makes sense. No, Siphonophors are like weird no matter how you look at them.
Yeah.
So one example of note here, the one will the best defines the discussion here today is the giant sephon a four or the prey a duvia. This is a tube shaped sephona four that can reach lengths of up to one hundred and thirty feet or forty meters. This is frequently pointed out to be as long as a blue whale, but also about as wide as a broom handle. What, yeah, that.
Just seems like an animal body of that or it should not exist exactly.
And this is like the only plays that could exist, you know, where they can have they kind of have the space to exist, but also they're ultimately delicate, dangerous to the creatures that they consume, but delicate, and they need a place where they're not going to be tossed around by the by the sea. Down here, it's relatively quiet. It's long tube like body maneuvers via pulsating meducie, and one end features a gas filled noumataphor to provide buoyancy.
Okay, so it's got kind of a bubble that helps it negotiate where it floats to, and then it's got the pulsating you said, maneuvers with meducie. What are these threadlike or hair like things that project off of it?
Yeah, a little little yeah, kind of wiggly bits, And the overall appearance of the creature, especially in sketches, is kind of like a weird alien like jelly pelvis bone that would be that would be the buoyancy providing noumataphor, and then it looks like there's kind of a noodle rib spiny length growing out of it. It reminds me a bit of illustrations of yokai that I've seen, particularly the rokuro Kubi yokai, where it's like a woman with a long snakelike neck, except in this case there's no body. It's just it's just a strange creature to behold.
Super creepy, Yes, it's repulsion attraction reaction I'm having, like I don't want to get near it, but also want to wrap it around myself.
Yes. Yeah, Now, in a vast and sparsely populated environment, you've got to be swift, you got to be a patient, or you've got to be attractive. And I guess the giant Savana four seems to engage in a little bit of both patient and attractive because, on one hand, it uses bright blue bioluminescence to attract prey, and I'm to understand that they, like most siphonophores, are also fairly selective in this case, grab vitating to areas where favored prey are present or will be present. You know, there's some sort of they're going to go where the food is going to be, and then it can grab with its tentacles and sting with its nomaticists before passing the bits of now food its prey onto the digestive zooids that will carry on digestion.
I'm curious, do you know why the bioluminescence works to attract prey, Like, what are the prey trying to get out? Or do the prey eat something that normally glows blue as well.
Well. I should first of all stress that blue green light this tends to be the standard among bioluminescent animals in the deep. Sometimes red light is used for a different reason than we may get into later on. As for what the siphonof war in question here is doing, what is it mimicking? According to the Nterey Bay Aquarium's Wonderful overview page on bioluminescence, there are siphonophores that use this kind of bioluminescent lure to mimic the appearance of copods. This is a common prey organism for deep sea fishes, and so that seems to be what's probably going on here, mimicking one prey animal to attract in predators which then become the prey. Now, when it comes to the exact zones that we find the giants, I found a four in a lot of resources out there are pointing to the zones above the Hatel zone, so still the deep deep ocean, but not the deepest trenches. And yet on the other hand, there is also evidence that they do go into the Hatel waters or do reside there. Again, we have to remind ourselves that we don't know everything about these deep ocean trenches. They are mysterious places, and a lot of those mysteries remain. A lot more research and exploration is required, but there is some evidence that we do find giant sciphonophors or some type of sciphonophoor some related species in these waters, as we'll explain here. And I was reading about this in a twenty twenty one edition of the Journal of Plankton Research paper by Alan J. Jamison and Thomas D. Linley, and they said that we have observed a probable sciphonophour within the Mariana Trench at a depth of eighty eight meters, which is well within the Hadel zone. And I've included here for you as well, Joe. It's it's image C of the ABC image block that we're looking at here.
Ooh, okay, so we're looking at a cameras have captured some stuff from the ocean floor and image C. It just looks like we're looking out into this blue water that's illuminated with our official light, of course, and then there's something that looks almost like a constellation of little little star like freckles kind of zipping around in a strange arrangement.
Yeah, what we're seeing here, apparently is that trailing link the siphosome. This is the part that is going to ultimately be fishing for prey. The net is out, as the authors here describe it. Again, we don't have enough evidence here to really tell exactly what species we're looking at, or you know, to make a case it is a new species, but they say that it's very likely a relative of the giant Sephono four, and it's probably a member of the same suborder. Full identification could not be made, but this evidence does seem to indicate that known and maybe unknown species of siphonophores do hunt in hatel waters.
That's a whole other kind of deep sea horror.
And Yeah, one of the things I love about the Sephonophores is that we I think, by you know, by this point, I mean, everyone's seen a lot of like really cool images of deep sea fish with their you know, translucent bodies, their needle like teeth and bioluminescent bulges and other strange properties. You're gonna make them very frightening. But it's almost like that's an extrapolation of a fish, and and we're prepared for that, but we're sometimes less prepared for just how again how weird seiphonophores are, even though we've also find siphonophores again at the surface of the ocean up there with the Portuguese Man of Wars. But yeah, they're these, like the giant siphonophor is just such a strange creature. And the idea that there are things like this just floating around and the deep ocean, uh, you know, making their way towards the places where their favored prey are found, and then casting their bioluminescent net in order to draw them in and then sting them as they brush up against them, and then pass them on to their you know, specific colonial zooids that are going to complete the digestion task.
You'd have to think if one of those things get you, you'd just be like, fair enough, digest me. Well, that is a truly fascinating organism, and I think we're going to have to call it there for today on part one of this series, but we will be back with more. We're not done talking about predation in the deepest parts of the ocean. We'll have at least one more part for you, maybe more.
That's right, we'll be back with maybe with some expected cases of deep sea predators, but also perhaps some unexpected examples as well. All Right, in the meantime, we just want to remind everyone that's stuffed auble. Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We air a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
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