March 7, 2026 • 50 mins
In this classic 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. (part 1 of 4, originally published 3/18/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. Today is, of course Saturday, so
we have a vault episode for you. This is part
one of four in our Hunters of the Dark Ocean series.
This episode originally aired three eighteen, twenty twenty five. It's
time to get deep and time to get weird. Let's
have it.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
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 oceans 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
(01:02):
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 del Sabella 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
(01:26):
and Biodiversity by Johanna Weston, Carolina Gonzales, Reuben Escrubano, and
Osvaldo Uloa, and the paper was called a new large
predator Amphibida eucyrite hidden at Haitel 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
(01:49):
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
(02:09):
question as we as we move on in the series.
But so, the authors of this paper included scientists affiliated
with the Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in the United States and
the Instituto Millennio dey Oceanographia, which is based at the
Universidad des Concepcion in Chile. Now, again, this paper was
(02:30):
marking the discovery of a new species of oceanic predator,
and the name they gave to the new predator was
Delcibella keman Chaka. 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 keman Chaka, which I saw in several
(02:51):
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 Kamanchaka also refers, according
to the authors of this paper, to quote a dense,
low coastal fog that forms by the Atacama Desert and
(03:13):
moves inland. Kamanchaka's 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
(03:34):
be named darkness? Well, it's because Dulcibella Kimanchaka 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
(03:55):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I often referred to it as the marine snow.
I think of it as kind of like the gray
rainfall of little pieces of flesh.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
The blessed rot that sustains us all. And in addition
to these interesting general qualities, 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 Hadl zone, or the deepest
(05:55):
forty five percent of the ocean from six thousand to
eleven thousand meters, has hotigh 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 Atacoma Trench, the southern sector of
(06:16):
the Peru Chile Trench, is one of the most geographically
isolated HATEL features and is situated below eutrophic surface waters
and characterized by high sediment loads. The Atacomma Trench is
known to host a highly distinctive funnel community driven by
a combination of these isolating factors. So it's not just
(06:38):
the things that are true of 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.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Kind of a Galapagos of the deep. Perhaps, to play
with that island comparison.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
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 corchetav but then they also
mentioned the RV Eltannan. Yeah, and we talked about some
(07:26):
deep ocean 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 Eltannan quote antenna.
Many people have said, oh, yeah, this has to be
(07:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
So coming back to this newly discovered species, the new
species is an amphipod.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Now.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
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.
(08:35):
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.
(08:56):
If you want a good little freak out, look up
the amphipod genus Epimeria epi me r I A with
a few of the guys in this genus, I get
strong notes of the toxic jungle from NAUSICAA.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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 everywhere these days, you know, the sort of thing
that is in and of itself unnerving and disturbing. But
(09:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
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
(10:14):
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 some AI garbage that's
like a fake image of some monster in a jungle.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, yeah, it's I don't like it.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
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 and I just immediately navigate away.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
But yeah, there's currently a sameness to so much of it,
and I guess I should appreciate that sameness while 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.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Yeah, but back to real troubling waters, right.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
So Amphipods can be found in all over the place,
many habitats that 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.
(11:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
We're at like.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
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
(11:57):
twenty three. There was like a they call it like
a land or 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
(12:20):
and species name, but to a kind of interesting side
note on taxonomic frustrations. 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.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yes, yes, Robert Goulay would have loved this choice in
genus name because the lyrics to don Quixote the mana
lamacha musical. Rather, it goes like, you know, Dulcinea, Dulcinea,
I see heaven when I see the Dulcinea.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Okay, I don't know that one. It's a great musical, Okay,
I'll look it up.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
I've heard of it before, obviously, but yeah, I've never
seen it or listened. But 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.
(13:20):
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,
(13:43):
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
(14:06):
he names Dulcinea del toboso. Dulcinea derived from like dulce,
like 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 cumun chaka meaning darkness,
darkness in several indigenous and Deean languages, this predatory amphipod's
(14:27):
name basically means sweet darkness. It's like the name of
a necromancer's pet. And so this is.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Just even the name Dulcinea darkness. That sounds pretty great.
That's got some great noir vibes to it.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
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 that 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 beatles
(15:04):
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 a signed sometime in
the past, and according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature,
you cannot reuse names, so they had.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
To change the name.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
They changed it to Dulcibella, also a nickname derived from
the word for sweet or sweetness, also basically meaning milady.
And so now we end up with Dulcibella common chaka. Still,
I think you can still say sweet darkness.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
By the way, some of you might have noticed that
I said dulcinea earlier and not dulcinea. In the musical
they say dulcinea. 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.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
I think we also are bound to be forgiving of
pronuncia differences.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I think Peter O'Toole sings at 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.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
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, Come and Chaka. The first thing
I have to acknowledge is what many other articles have
(16:32):
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
(16:54):
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 ride.
It is monstrously face huggery in multiple ways, not in
(17:17):
body shape, but otherwise.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
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, he has
that kind of appearance, 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
(17:39):
look to it with its various mouth parts. It looks
almost like it has like cuthulhuoid tentacles or something. It
has a real kind of sinister vibe.
Speaker 4 (17:50):
I have to say.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
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 when I was first looking
at this picture. Because one way I would have initially
described this is it's like a cavefish.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Xenomor of shrimp dog with a broom for a face.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
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 they 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
(18:33):
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, I don't know, mind flarers are rendered
with like all the tentacles coming out of the face.
(18:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
So it's even weirder when you look at it the
right way around, because its head is up here, not
down there. Wow.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
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
(19:38):
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 deck till i are.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Zero point six x.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
A distal spiniform process on the peduncle of europod one,
and an elongated but weakly cleft telson. And that as
it's like, I don't know, sexy or something.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It is sexy or something. Yes, the peduncle of europod one.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
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 sea floor scrubber, but an active predator that chases
down prey. Typically it's prey being other amphipods. You might
(20:43):
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 four
claws that looks you can kind of imagine like the
clause of a praying mantis, you know, these folding four
(21:05):
claws that can grab and then feed prey toward the mouth.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Strong elements of JABBERWOCKI I want to say to all
of the language involved in this description, Yeah, yeah, I
feel like the nathapods surely outgrabe at.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
One point or another.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Yes, yes, I just had to look up the poem
because 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
(21:44):
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 the super deep
like the Hadel Zone, the deep ocean trenches. And one
thing that some authors writing about this discovery mentioned is
(22:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The idea of looking into dark, lightless oceans, well,
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, we know more
than we ever have regarding these depths, but there is
(22:41):
still so much mystery, and you know, it's just there.
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 explode and be damaged
(23:03):
in ways that don't apply as much to other organisms
you might collect. Many of these are very delicate as well.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
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 predators doing down there?
What challenges to predators in the deep deep ocean face
and how do they make a living?
Speaker 1 (23:32):
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 aside. It's a realm of pretty chilling waters.
(23:56):
And to be on the ocean floor is to feel
the pressure of the water colo 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
(24:16):
thirty four to thirty nine degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
So an extreme environment and organisms that want to adapt
or evolve to survive there need to need to make
some pretty radical investments.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
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
(24:50):
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 ephotic zone, the dark ocean is the majority of
the Earth. It's the realm. Alien observers might, by some metric,
(25:13):
consider the default tearan environment, you know, like on the
rocky surface, covered by crushing amounts of water and out
of reach of sunlight.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Yeah, so like terrestrial animals by comparison, are just the
thing that is living on certain mountaintops.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
The dark ocean entails the mesopalgic the back of the logic,
and the abyssopalalgic and the deepest hatopalagic zone, which is
also known as the hatal zone. And again in the
darkness here there is diversity, there is life.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
But that doesn't mean life there is easy and in
many ways in the deep ocean, animals may face some
challenges that that you might not think of, not just
the cold and the darkness and the pressure, but maybe
resource challenges.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
That's right, has 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 food scarcity and this
results in an overall lack of density in organisms. The
(26:29):
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
(26:51):
steadily towards the bottom. Now coming back to the hadal
zone specifically, here again the absolute deep 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
(27:15):
talking again about long, narrow, topographic v shaped depressions, and
so you might well wonder, okay, well, given their comparatively
limited horizontal footprint, how often are there going to be
sufficient falls such as a whalefall of some sort to
feed the Hatle zone. Again, if we were to think
(27:36):
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?
Speaker 4 (27:52):
So that's what I was, like a long shot.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, yeah, 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 desk Gupta at All from twenty
twenty four titled Depth and Predation Regulate Consumption of Dolphin
(28:15):
carcasses in the Hadal Zone. This is from Deep Sea Research,
Part one Oceanographic Research Papers. So they point out that
we've known about whalefalls and smaller sized food falls for
more than three decades, and with that the realization that
these are important food sources, particularly for the deep kicking
(28:36):
up temporary and some 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
(28:56):
drop some dead dolphins down a couple of trenches and
watch and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
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 you know, it's hard to like come across
this naturally, right.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
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
(29:33):
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 Marianna Trench and the other
(29:55):
down the Philippine Basin.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Okay, so the reason that was not recorded before is
not because it doesn't happen, but because it's limited our
limited ability to look for it.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
Naturally happen exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Now I want to feature a little reminder here about
sort of the phases. There are generally four phases of
whalefall 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 at some depth through another The first
(30:27):
stage is the mobile scavenger stage. Scavengers or necrophages arrive
for the soft tissues, and the resulting feast can last
four 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,
(30:49):
you know, of a human scenario. Imagine prospectors discovering gold, oil,
or some other desired resource and a previously unoccupied or
scarcely occupied area. What sort of stages of development and
then abandonment end up occurring?
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Okay? Cool?
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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
(31:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
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
(32:31):
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
(32:53):
the researchers observe 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. Huh. So what they observed
with phase one They had hatl amphipods, which we were
(33:15):
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 hatle amphipods, no
snail fish at the Mariana Trench drop. So without the
predatory snail fish in action, the scavengers, the scavenging amphipods
(33:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
Ah okay, that's interesting. Yeah, So the presence of secondary
predators complicates how the initial resources are consumed. So the
dolphin 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
(34:09):
ability to quickly consume the carcass.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
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
(34:36):
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 time frame of a given whale fall
is going to depend not only on the animals that
(34:56):
sinks to, the depths, the size of the carcass, but
also on 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.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
Oh well, that totally makes sense.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
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, you take
a dead cow and you put it in the middle
of the desert, something different is going to happen to it.
Then if you take that same dead cow and you
put it, you know, in the middle of the forest.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
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. 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.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
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 the
Hadel zone. And we see that reflected in the various
ways that the denizens of the deep live their lives
in terms of reproduction, but also in terms of how
(36:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
And so for the remainder of this episode, I wanted
to talk about one example of a predator of the
deep of the 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 sciphonophores on the show before,
(37:24):
and I know I've talked about easily the most famous
sciphono four 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.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I mean, how often do you get to bring up
a sciphonophoor in conversation?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah, because I mean, the thing about the Portuguese men
of war is that it is a sciphonopoor 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 house
or something, which they're not doing. But yeah, siphonophores are
just so endlessly weird and wonderful. They're hydrozoans, and they
(38:11):
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
(38:32):
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 whole, each
(38:53):
comprising an essential system of that whole. So to employ
an imperfect comparison here, if you know Ultron. Vultron is
a large mech mecha robot that is made out of
smaller mecha lion robots, you know that are piloted by humans.
Except in this situation, imagine that the lions that form
(39:15):
our Vultron cannot exist separate from the whole. 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
(39:37):
have a section called the neumataphor, which provides buoyancy, and
this is very obvious with the Portuguese man o 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
(39:58):
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 siphonophs in general,
they are predatory carnivores, and and there they are. They're
(40:18):
active predatory carnivores in their own peculiar way.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
It's actually a more horrifying kind of predation even than
we're used to.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
You think, a bit more like the blob.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah, yeah, And it's like that level of just like
you look at the body layout of one of these
and I guess you know, they have more of a
body layout than the blob, but it's still you know,
vastly inhuman and non mammalion, non vertebrate, and and even
so different from the you know, invertebrate worlds of other animals.
You can't just turn it around and say, oh, well
(40:51):
that's the head and now it makes sense. No, Sciphonophores
are like weird no matter how you look at them.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
So one example of note here, the one will the
best defines the discussion here today, is the giant Sephona
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,
(41:18):
but also about as wide as.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
A broom handle. What.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah, that just seems like an animal body of that
sort should not.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
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 sea. Down here, it's relatively quiet.
(41:47):
Its long tube like body maneuvers via pulsating meduci and
one end features a gas filled noumataphor to provide buoyancy.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Okay, so it's got kind of a bubble that helps
the negotiate where it floats to, and then it's got
the pulsating you said, maneuvers with MEDUSI what are these
little threadlike or hair like things that project off of it?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
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
(42:34):
a bit of illustrations of yokai that I've seen, particularly
the Rokoro 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.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
Super creepy.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Yes, repulsion attraction reaction I'm having like I don't want
to get near it, but also want to wrap it
around myself.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yes. Yeah, Now, in a vast and sparse 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 sevano 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
(43:19):
understand that they, like most siphonophores, are also fairly selective,
in this case, gravitating 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
(43:40):
now food its prey onto the digestive zooids that will
carry on digestion.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (44:00):
We 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 sciphono war in question here is doing, what
is it mimicking? According to the Nterey Bay Aquarium's Wonderful
(44:21):
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 the predators which then
(44:44):
become the prey. Now, when it comes to the exact
zones that we find the giant's siphonophoor in a lot
of resources out there are pointing to the zones above
(45:05):
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
Hadel 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
(45:26):
those mysteries remain. A lot more research and exploration is required,
but there is some evidence that we do find giant
siphonophors 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
(45:47):
Journal of Plankton Research paper by Alan J. Jamison and
Thomas D. Linley, and they said that we have observed
a probable sciphonophoor within the Mariana Trench at a depth
of eight meters, which is well within the Hadle zone.
And I've included here for you as well, Joe. It's
(46:09):
image C of the ABC image block that we're looking
at here.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Ooh, okay, so we're looking at a cameras have captured
some stuff from the ocean floor, and the 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
(46:33):
a strange arrangement.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yeah, what we're seeing here, apparently is that trailing link
the cciphosome. 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
(46:55):
new species, but they say that it's very likely a
relative of the giants Sephonophore uh, 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.
Speaker 4 (47:15):
That's a whole other kind of deep sea horror.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
And Yeah, one of the things I love about the
sulphonophores 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 or needle like teeth and bioluminescent bulges and
other strange properties and gonna make them very frightening. But
(47:41):
it's almost like that's an extrapolation of a fish and uh,
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. Uh,
up there with the Portuguese Man of Wars. But yeah,
they're these like the giants I find for is just
such a strange creature. And the idea that there are
(48:06):
things like this just floating around in the deep ocean,
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 sting them as
they brush up against them, and then pass them on
to their specific colonial zooids that are going to complete
(48:29):
the digestion task.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
But we will be back with more.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
We're not done talking about predation in the deepest parts
of the ocean.
Speaker 4 (48:51):
We'll have at least one more part for you, maybe more.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
That's right, We'll be back with maybe with some expected
cases of deep sea predators, but also perhaps unexpected examples
as well. All right. In the meantime, we just want
to remind everyone that Stuff to Blow 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
(49:14):
just talk about a weird film here on a weird
house cinema.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
The represents pot
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. Today is, of course Saturday, so
we have a vault episode for you. This is part
one of four in our Hunters of the Dark Ocean series.
This episode originally aired three eighteen, twenty twenty five. It's
time to get deep and time to get weird. Let's
have it.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
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 oceans 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
(01:02):
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 del Sabella 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
(01:26):
and Biodiversity by Johanna Weston, Carolina Gonzales, Reuben Escrubano, and
Osvaldo Uloa, and the paper was called a new large
predator Amphibida eucyrite hidden at Haitel 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
(01:49):
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
(02:09):
question as we as we move on in the series.
But so, the authors of this paper included scientists affiliated
with the Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in the United States and
the Instituto Millennio dey Oceanographia, which is based at the
Universidad des Concepcion in Chile. Now, again, this paper was
(02:30):
marking the discovery of a new species of oceanic predator,
and the name they gave to the new predator was
Delcibella keman Chaka. 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 keman Chaka, which I saw in several
(02:51):
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 Kamanchaka also refers, according
to the authors of this paper, to quote a dense,
low coastal fog that forms by the Atacama Desert and
(03:13):
moves inland. Kamanchaka's 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
(03:34):
be named darkness? Well, it's because Dulcibella Kimanchaka 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
(03:55):
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
(04:20):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Yeah. Yeah. I often referred to it as the marine snow.
I think of it as kind of like the gray
rainfall of little pieces of flesh.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
The blessed rot that sustains us all. And in addition
to these interesting general qualities, 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 Hadl zone, or the deepest
(05:55):
forty five percent of the ocean from six thousand to
eleven thousand meters, has hotigh 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 Atacoma Trench, the southern sector of
(06:16):
the Peru Chile Trench, is one of the most geographically
isolated HATEL features and is situated below eutrophic surface waters
and characterized by high sediment loads. The Atacomma Trench is
known to host a highly distinctive funnel community driven by
a combination of these isolating factors. So it's not just
(06:38):
the things that are true of 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.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Kind of a Galapagos of the deep. Perhaps, to play
with that island comparison.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
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 corchetav but then they also
mentioned the RV Eltannan. Yeah, and we talked about some
(07:26):
deep ocean 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 Eltannan quote antenna.
Many people have said, oh, yeah, this has to be
(07:47):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
So coming back to this newly discovered species, the new
species is an amphipod.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Now.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
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.
(08:35):
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.
(08:56):
If you want a good little freak out, look up
the amphipod genus Epimeria epi me r I A with
a few of the guys in this genus, I get
strong notes of the toxic jungle from NAUSICAA.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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 everywhere these days, you know, the sort of thing
that is in and of itself unnerving and disturbing. But
(09:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
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
(10:14):
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 some AI garbage that's
like a fake image of some monster in a jungle.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, yeah, it's I don't like it.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
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 and I just immediately navigate away.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
But yeah, there's currently a sameness to so much of it,
and I guess I should appreciate that sameness while 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.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Yeah, but back to real troubling waters, right.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
So Amphipods can be found in all over the place,
many habitats that 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.
(11:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
We're at like.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
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
(11:57):
twenty three. There was like a they call it like
a land or 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
(12:20):
and species name, but to a kind of interesting side
note on taxonomic frustrations. 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.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Yes, yes, Robert Goulay would have loved this choice in
genus name because the lyrics to don Quixote the mana
lamacha musical. Rather, it goes like, you know, Dulcinea, Dulcinea,
I see heaven when I see the Dulcinea.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
Okay, I don't know that one. It's a great musical, Okay,
I'll look it up.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
I've heard of it before, obviously, but yeah, I've never
seen it or listened. But 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.
(13:20):
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,
(13:43):
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
(14:06):
he names Dulcinea del toboso. Dulcinea derived from like dulce,
like 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 cumun chaka meaning darkness,
darkness in several indigenous and Deean languages, this predatory amphipod's
(14:27):
name basically means sweet darkness. It's like the name of
a necromancer's pet. And so this is.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Just even the name Dulcinea darkness. That sounds pretty great.
That's got some great noir vibes to it.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
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 that 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 beatles
(15:04):
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 a signed sometime in
the past, and according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature,
you cannot reuse names, so they had.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
To change the name.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
They changed it to Dulcibella, also a nickname derived from
the word for sweet or sweetness, also basically meaning milady.
And so now we end up with Dulcibella common chaka. Still,
I think you can still say sweet darkness.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
By the way, some of you might have noticed that
I said dulcinea earlier and not dulcinea. In the musical
they say dulcinea. 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.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
I think we also are bound to be forgiving of
pronuncia differences.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I think Peter O'Toole sings at 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.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
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, Come and Chaka. The first thing
I have to acknowledge is what many other articles have
(16:32):
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
(16:54):
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 ride.
It is monstrously face huggery in multiple ways, not in
(17:17):
body shape, but otherwise.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
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, he has
that kind of appearance, 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
(17:39):
look to it with its various mouth parts. It looks
almost like it has like cuthulhuoid tentacles or something. It
has a real kind of sinister vibe.
Speaker 4 (17:50):
I have to say.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
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 when I was first looking
at this picture. Because one way I would have initially
described this is it's like a cavefish.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Xenomor of shrimp dog with a broom for a face.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
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 they 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
(18:33):
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, I don't know, mind flarers are rendered
with like all the tentacles coming out of the face.
(18:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
So it's even weirder when you look at it the
right way around, because its head is up here, not
down there. Wow.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
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
(19:38):
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 deck till i are.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Zero point six x.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
A distal spiniform process on the peduncle of europod one,
and an elongated but weakly cleft telson. And that as
it's like, I don't know, sexy or something.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
It is sexy or something. Yes, the peduncle of europod one.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
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 sea floor scrubber, but an active predator that chases
down prey. Typically it's prey being other amphipods. You might
(20:43):
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 four
claws that looks you can kind of imagine like the
clause of a praying mantis, you know, these folding four
(21:05):
claws that can grab and then feed prey toward the mouth.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Strong elements of JABBERWOCKI I want to say to all
of the language involved in this description, Yeah, yeah, I
feel like the nathapods surely outgrabe at.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
One point or another.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Yes, yes, I just had to look up the poem
because 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
(21:44):
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 the super deep
like the Hadel Zone, the deep ocean trenches. And one
thing that some authors writing about this discovery mentioned is
(22:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The idea of looking into dark, lightless oceans, well,
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, we know more
than we ever have regarding these depths, but there is
(22:41):
still so much mystery, and you know, it's just there.
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 explode and be damaged
(23:03):
in ways that don't apply as much to other organisms
you might collect. Many of these are very delicate as well.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
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 predators doing down there?
What challenges to predators in the deep deep ocean face
and how do they make a living?
Speaker 1 (23:32):
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 aside. It's a realm of pretty chilling waters.
(23:56):
And to be on the ocean floor is to feel
the pressure of the water colo 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
(24:16):
thirty four to thirty nine degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
So an extreme environment and organisms that want to adapt
or evolve to survive there need to need to make
some pretty radical investments.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
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
(24:50):
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 ephotic zone, the dark ocean is the majority of
the Earth. It's the realm. Alien observers might, by some metric,
(25:13):
consider the default tearan environment, you know, like on the
rocky surface, covered by crushing amounts of water and out
of reach of sunlight.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Yeah, so like terrestrial animals by comparison, are just the
thing that is living on certain mountaintops.
Speaker 4 (25:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
The dark ocean entails the mesopalgic the back of the logic,
and the abyssopalalgic and the deepest hatopalagic zone, which is
also known as the hatal zone. And again in the
darkness here there is diversity, there is life.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
But that doesn't mean life there is easy and in
many ways in the deep ocean, animals may face some
challenges that that you might not think of, not just
the cold and the darkness and the pressure, but maybe
resource challenges.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
That's right, has 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 food scarcity and this
results in an overall lack of density in organisms. The
(26:29):
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
(26:51):
steadily towards the bottom. Now coming back to the hadal
zone specifically, here again the absolute deep 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
(27:15):
talking again about long, narrow, topographic v shaped depressions, and
so you might well wonder, okay, well, given their comparatively
limited horizontal footprint, how often are there going to be
sufficient falls such as a whalefall of some sort to
feed the Hatle zone. Again, if we were to think
(27:36):
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?
Speaker 4 (27:52):
So that's what I was, like a long shot.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Yeah, yeah, 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 desk Gupta at All from twenty
twenty four titled Depth and Predation Regulate Consumption of Dolphin
(28:15):
carcasses in the Hadal Zone. This is from Deep Sea Research,
Part one Oceanographic Research Papers. So they point out that
we've known about whalefalls and smaller sized food falls for
more than three decades, and with that the realization that
these are important food sources, particularly for the deep kicking
(28:36):
up temporary and some 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
(28:56):
drop some dead dolphins down a couple of trenches and
watch and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
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 you know, it's hard to like come across
this naturally, right.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
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
(29:33):
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 Marianna Trench and the other
(29:55):
down the Philippine Basin.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
Okay, so the reason that was not recorded before is
not because it doesn't happen, but because it's limited our
limited ability to look for it.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
Naturally happen exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Now I want to feature a little reminder here about
sort of the phases. There are generally four phases of
whalefall 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 at some depth through another The first
(30:27):
stage is the mobile scavenger stage. Scavengers or necrophages arrive
for the soft tissues, and the resulting feast can last
four 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,
(30:49):
you know, of a human scenario. Imagine prospectors discovering gold, oil,
or some other desired resource and a previously unoccupied or
scarcely occupied area. What sort of stages of development and
then abandonment end up occurring?
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Okay? Cool?
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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
(31:29):
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.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
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
(32:31):
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
(32:53):
the researchers observe 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. Huh. So what they observed
with phase one They had hatl amphipods, which we were
(33:15):
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 hatle amphipods, no
snail fish at the Mariana Trench drop. So without the
predatory snail fish in action, the scavengers, the scavenging amphipods
(33:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
Ah okay, that's interesting. Yeah, So the presence of secondary
predators complicates how the initial resources are consumed. So the
dolphin 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
(34:09):
ability to quickly consume the carcass.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
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
(34:36):
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 time frame of a given whale fall
is going to depend not only on the animals that
(34:56):
sinks to, the depths, the size of the carcass, but
also on 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.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
Oh well, that totally makes sense.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
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, you take
a dead cow and you put it in the middle
of the desert, something different is going to happen to it.
Then if you take that same dead cow and you
put it, you know, in the middle of the forest.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
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. 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.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
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 the
Hadel zone. And we see that reflected in the various
ways that the denizens of the deep live their lives
in terms of reproduction, but also in terms of how
(36:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
And so for the remainder of this episode, I wanted
to talk about one example of a predator of the
deep of the 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 sciphonophores on the show before,
(37:24):
and I know I've talked about easily the most famous
sciphono four 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.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I mean, how often do you get to bring up
a sciphonophoor in conversation?
Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah, because I mean, the thing about the Portuguese men
of war is that it is a sciphonopoor 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 house
or something, which they're not doing. But yeah, siphonophores are
just so endlessly weird and wonderful. They're hydrozoans, and they
(38:11):
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
(38:32):
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 whole, each
(38:53):
comprising an essential system of that whole. So to employ
an imperfect comparison here, if you know Ultron. Vultron is
a large mech mecha robot that is made out of
smaller mecha lion robots, you know that are piloted by humans.
Except in this situation, imagine that the lions that form
(39:15):
our Vultron cannot exist separate from the whole. 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
(39:37):
have a section called the neumataphor, which provides buoyancy, and
this is very obvious with the Portuguese man o 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
(39:58):
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 siphonophs in general,
they are predatory carnivores, and and there they are. They're
(40:18):
active predatory carnivores in their own peculiar way.
Speaker 3 (40:23):
It's actually a more horrifying kind of predation even than
we're used to.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
You think, a bit more like the blob.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
Yeah, yeah, And it's like that level of just like
you look at the body layout of one of these
and I guess you know, they have more of a
body layout than the blob, but it's still you know,
vastly inhuman and non mammalion, non vertebrate, and and even
so different from the you know, invertebrate worlds of other animals.
You can't just turn it around and say, oh, well
(40:51):
that's the head and now it makes sense. No, Sciphonophores
are like weird no matter how you look at them.
Speaker 4 (40:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
So one example of note here, the one will the
best defines the discussion here today, is the giant Sephona
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,
(41:18):
but also about as wide as.
Speaker 4 (41:19):
A broom handle. What.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah, that just seems like an animal body of that
sort should not.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
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 sea. Down here, it's relatively quiet.
(41:47):
Its long tube like body maneuvers via pulsating meduci and
one end features a gas filled noumataphor to provide buoyancy.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Okay, so it's got kind of a bubble that helps
the negotiate where it floats to, and then it's got
the pulsating you said, maneuvers with MEDUSI what are these
little threadlike or hair like things that project off of it?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
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
(42:34):
a bit of illustrations of yokai that I've seen, particularly
the Rokoro 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.
Speaker 4 (42:48):
Super creepy.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Yes, repulsion attraction reaction I'm having like I don't want
to get near it, but also want to wrap it
around myself.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yes. Yeah, Now, in a vast and sparse 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 sevano 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
(43:19):
understand that they, like most siphonophores, are also fairly selective,
in this case, gravitating 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
(43:40):
now food its prey onto the digestive zooids that will
carry on digestion.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (44:00):
We 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 sciphono war in question here is doing, what
is it mimicking? According to the Nterey Bay Aquarium's Wonderful
(44:21):
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 the predators which then
(44:44):
become the prey. Now, when it comes to the exact
zones that we find the giant's siphonophoor in a lot
of resources out there are pointing to the zones above
(45:05):
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
Hadel 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
(45:26):
those mysteries remain. A lot more research and exploration is required,
but there is some evidence that we do find giant
siphonophors 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
(45:47):
Journal of Plankton Research paper by Alan J. Jamison and
Thomas D. Linley, and they said that we have observed
a probable sciphonophoor within the Mariana Trench at a depth
of eight meters, which is well within the Hadle zone.
And I've included here for you as well, Joe. It's
(46:09):
image C of the ABC image block that we're looking
at here.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Ooh, okay, so we're looking at a cameras have captured
some stuff from the ocean floor, and the 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
(46:33):
a strange arrangement.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yeah, what we're seeing here, apparently is that trailing link
the cciphosome. 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
(46:55):
new species, but they say that it's very likely a
relative of the giants Sephonophore uh, 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.
Speaker 4 (47:15):
That's a whole other kind of deep sea horror.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
And Yeah, one of the things I love about the
sulphonophores 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 or needle like teeth and bioluminescent bulges and
other strange properties and gonna make them very frightening. But
(47:41):
it's almost like that's an extrapolation of a fish and uh,
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. Uh,
up there with the Portuguese Man of Wars. But yeah,
they're these like the giants I find for is just
such a strange creature. And the idea that there are
(48:06):
things like this just floating around in the deep ocean,
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 sting them as
they brush up against them, and then pass them on
to their specific colonial zooids that are going to complete
(48:29):
the digestion task.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
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.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
But we will be back with more.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
We're not done talking about predation in the deepest parts
of the ocean.
Speaker 4 (48:51):
We'll have at least one more part for you, maybe more.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
That's right, We'll be back with maybe with some expected
cases of deep sea predators, but also perhaps unexpected examples
as well. All right. In the meantime, we just want
to remind everyone that Stuff to Blow 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
(49:14):
just talk about a weird film here on a weird
house cinema.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
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