March 18, 2025 • 49 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Rob and Joe discuss the recent discovery of a strange new deep-water predator and highlight some of the various weird, wild and downright gnarly hunters that haunt the deepest, darkest depths of Earth’s oceans.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, we're going to be starting a discussion
about animal life in the deepest parts of the ocean,
specifically the deep ocean's predators, looking at what it takes
to be an active hunter in the deep. And I
thought a good place to start off with this series
(00:37):
would be the story that inspired me to look at
this topic, and that was the discovery last year of
a new species known as Delsabella common chaka. You may
have seen stories about this. It was covered in some
popular press, but the finding was described in a November
(00:58):
twenty twenty four paper published in the journal Systematics and
Biodiversity by Johanna Weston, Carolina Gonzales, Reuben Escribano, and Osvaldo Uloa,
and the paper was called a new large predator Amphibida
useyrite hidden at Haitl depths of the Atacama Trench. Now,
(01:19):
one of the things that really got my attention when
I was first reading about this was simply what this
animal looks like. We'll get to a physical description of
it in just a minute. But the other thing that
I thought was really interesting is the ecological question how
an animal like this makes its living in such an environment,
what it takes to be a predator so far down
(01:41):
in the ocean. And we'll be continuing to explore that
question as we as we move on in the series.
So the authors of this paper included scientists affiliated with
the Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in the United States and the
Instituto millenniody Oceanographia, which is based at the Universidad des
(02:01):
Concepcion in Chile. Now, again, this paper was marking the
discovery of a new species of oceanic predator, and the
name they gave to the new predator was del Sibella Kemanchaka.
And this is interesting for a number of reasons. I'll
do a full etymology in just a minute here, but
especially I wanted to draw attention to the species name Kemanchaka,
(02:25):
which I saw in several sources was derived from an
Andean language word, a word apparently in several of the
Indian languages meaning darkness, but apparently it has multiple meanings.
So kemanchaka also refers, according to the authors of this paper,
to quote a dense, low coastal fog that forms by
(02:46):
the Atacama Desert and moves inland. Kamanchakas was also the
name given to some of the littoral inhabitants of this
desertic region, so mysterious swirling ideas. There a name that
means fog, a kind of fog that rolls in, rolls
in around the desert. And then also darkness itself. Now
(03:08):
why would the species be named darkness, Well, it's because
Dulcibella kim and Chaka was discovered at a depth of
almost eight thousand meters in a place called the Atacama Trench.
This is a deep ocean trench basically following the contour
off the coast of South America from perud Icile and
(03:28):
it's roughly one hundred and sixty kilometers or about one
hundred miles off shore for most of its length. And
as we will probably continue to come back to in
this series, there are a lot of interesting things about
this sort of environment. Deep ocean trenches, sometimes called the
Hadle zone, can function kind of like islands do in biogeography.
(03:53):
They create a pocket of environmental conditions surrounded on all
sides by much different conditions where the ocean is less
deep all around them. Unless the pressure is different, the
temperature is different. And thus in these in these deep
deep zones surrounded by the less deep deep zones, they
can evolve unique isolated organisms and biological relationships. So ocean
(04:20):
trenches are in many ways like islands inverted, but with
unique features. For example, the kind of ecosystem that's possible
in a deep ocean trench is based in part on
what happens in the ocean above it, like what kind
of biological productivity takes place up there, and by consequence,
(04:41):
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 2 (04:58):
Yeah. Yeah, often refer to does the marine snow? I
think of it as kind of like the gray rainfall
of little pieces of flesh.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
The blessed rot that sustains us all. And in addition
to these interesting general qualities that the Autocoma Trench itself
is especially interesting and unique because of its relative isolation
from other deep ocean trenches. So to read from the
paper here, the authors say, quote the Hatel zone, or
the deepest forty five percent of the ocean from six
(05:32):
thousand to eleven thousand meters, has high levels of undiscovered biodiversity.
Most Hatel features are trenches formed at the subduction zone
between tectonic plates and shaped by a unique suite of
extrinsic and intrinsic factors. The Autocoma Trench, the southern sector
of the Peru Chile Trench, is one of the most
(05:53):
geographically isolated Hatel features and is situated below eutrophic surface
waters and cara rised by high sediment loads. The Atakoma
Trench is known to host a highly distinctive faunel community
driven by a combination of these isolating factors. So it's
not just the things that are true of these these
(06:15):
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 2 (06:32):
Kind of a Galapagos of the deep, perhaps to play
with that island comparison.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Now, just a side note here because it connected to
something we've talked about before. The authors give a nod
to important early work done in characterizing hadel fauna in
the nineteen sixties by expeditions of the First of all,
they mentioned the RV academic Corchetov, but then they also
mentioned the r V el Tanan. Yeah, we talked about
(07:00):
some deep otion surveys by the Eltannan in a series
we did about sort of anomalous imagery taken underwater that
people ended up saying had to be UFOs or some
kind of technology from the future or Atlantis or anything
like that. In this case, the thing was the el
tannin quote antenna. Many people have said, oh, yeah, this
(07:22):
has to be a piece of alien technology because it
looks like a radar array with these aerials coming up.
In fact, it is almost definitely a carnivorous sponge.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
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 (07:43):
So coming back to this newly discovered species, the new
species is an amphipod now amphipods are animals belonging to
the order Amphipida, which are crustaceans found in both marine
and freshwater environments, usually described as having laterally compressed bodies,
so you can think of them as taller than they
(08:05):
are wide, maybe like somebody put them in a vice
and squeeze their sides in. I've seen a number of
sources describe amphipods as looking shrimp like, and that does
describe some of them. Confusingly, shrimp are not amphipods, but
a lot of apipods do look shrimp like, though not
all of them. Some of them look more like weird
(08:25):
fantasy insects. For example, just one I found that I
thought was very visually striking. If you want a good
little freak out, look up the amphipod genus Epimeria epi
me r Ia with a few of the guys in
this genus. I get strong notes of the toxic jungle
from NAUSICAA.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Absolutely, and this one image that you shared in our
outline here, in particular, I found extra grotesque because if
I didn't know better, I would dismiss this image as
that sort of horrifying AI generated monster imagery that you
see where are these days? You know, the sort of
thing that is in and of itself unnerving and disturbing.
(09:05):
But I've also swiftly conditioned myself to abhor them all
the more because I know they're not the product of
a human mind or a human imagination. So just looking
at this image makes my stomach churn in weird ways,
and I end up not really knowing how I feel
about it. But of course this is not an AI
generated monstrosity. This isn't an actual denizen of the natural world.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
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
(09:49):
generated fake images of things and saying like new beasts
discovered in whatever, And you know, it's almost like they're
like they're trying to trick us into doing an episode
on this new beast discovered as so AI garbage. That's
like a fake image of some monster in a jungle.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, yeah, I don't like it.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I mean, in a way. I appreciate it because it's
so distasteful. I'm not even tempted to scroll the news
feed for a few seconds. I just immediately navigate away.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
But yeah, there's currently a sameness to so much of it,
and I guess I should appreciate that sameness. Swile it's
still there. If it gets harder to tell them, even
harder to classify them and categorize them as AI generated things,
then we're even We're in even more troubling waters.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, but back to real troubling waters, right.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
So.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Amphipods can be found in all over the place, many habitats.
They take many different forms. It seems the majority of
amphipods are scavengers. They eat decomposing organisms or whatever little
bits of organic detritis they come across. The new species
described in this paper, however, is an active predator. According
(11:00):
to the authors, it is the first large active predator
ever found this deep in the Atacoma Trench. Again, it
was the individuals collected here. We're at like seventy nine
hundred meters down. All the other amphipods previously identified in
this area have been scavengers. Though predatory amphipods have been
(11:20):
found in other ocean trenches on Earth. So the specimens
here were collected by a deep sea vehicle operated by
Chile's Integrated Deep Ocean Observing System in twenty twenty three,
there was like a they call it like a lander vehicle.
So it's like a thing that can go down and
collect collect specimens, collect baited traps and things like that.
(11:41):
And according to morphological and genetic analysis, this new predator
is not only a newly discovered species, but a newly
discovered genus. And here's where I wanted to get back
to both the etymology of the genus and species name,
but to a kind of interesting side note on taxonomic frustration.
So the authors originally tried to give this animal the
(12:04):
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 2 (12:14):
Yes, yes, Robert Doolay would have loved this, this choice
in genus name because the lyrics to don Quixote the
man a Lamacha musical. Rather, it goes like, you know, Dulcinea, dulcinea,
I see heaven when I see the Dulcinea.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Okay, I don't know that one. It's a great musical, Okay,
I'll look it up. I've heard of it before, obviously,
but yeah, never, I've never seen it or listen. But
this this apparently, and so like trying to name this
genus after don Quixote was apparently following a pre existing
convention by which several other genera of deep sea amphipods
(12:52):
were named after characters from Servantes. So I've never read
don Quixote myself, so I didn't know who this character was,
and I was curious to look it up. The character
is called Dulcinea del Toboso and is a character that
is fictional or maybe better to say, imaginary, within the
narrative of the novel. So, the character don Quixote is,
(13:16):
you know, like a knight errant, and he thinks he
must have a lady to serve. So the way I
read it summarized is that he looks at a peasant
girl and then he kind of imagines a version of
her as this high born princess who is impossibly perfect
and worthy of his lance in every way, and so
he thinks of her as the ultimate all time milady.
(13:39):
And this character in his head he names Dulcinea del toboso.
Dulcinea derived from like dulce, the Latin word for sweet,
So this name would mean a superlative sweetness. And so,
together with what I already mentioned about the species name
cumunchaka meaning darkness, darkness in several indigenous and in languages,
(14:01):
this predatory amphipod's name basically means sweet darkness. It's like
the name of a necromancer's pet. And so this is
just even the name Dulcinea darkness. That sounds pretty great.
That's got some great noir vibes to it. Oh yeah,
it's like that saccharin goth thing. There's a lot of that,
a lot of that going on. And so this is
(14:23):
still basically what the animal is named. But remember I
was gonna mention taxonomic frustrations. So they were trying to
name the genus Dulcinea, but it turned out that name
had already been assigned to a genus of Coleoptera, I
mean beatles, a genus of beetles a long time ago,
I think over one hundred years ago. I don't even
know if that genus name is even used anymore, but
(14:45):
it had been assigned sometime in the past, and according
to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, you cannot reuse names,
so they had to change the name. They changed it
to Dulcibella, also a nickname derived from the word for
sweet or weakness, also basically meaning milady. And so now
we end up with dulcibella common chaka. Still, I think
(15:07):
you can still say sweet darkness.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
By the way, some of you might have noticed that
I said dulcinea earlier and not dulcinea. In the musical,
they say dulcinea, so I believe dulcinea is correct. So
I don't know. This is not a show that is
exclusively about musicals, though, so those are you more familiar
with Mana la mancha, perhaps you can write it about it.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
I think we also are bound to be forgiving of
pronunciation differences.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I think Peter O'Toole sings it dulcinea in the nineteen
seventy two adaptation of the musical. But we're not talking
about Peter o'tool We're talking about the deep ocean.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Right, So I think it's finally time to talk about
the physical form of this creature. So Rob, I've attached
a photo for you to look at in the outline here. Again,
folks at home, if you want to look it up yourselves,
you can google Dulcabella kamon Chaka. The first thing I
have to acknowledge is what many other articles have already
(16:07):
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
(16:28):
some places looks kind of like a shrimp covered in
white goo. In other places looks like a translucent white
skin stretched over a bumpy landscape of I got some
things in there that look like vertebrae, little leg joints
and knobs that were just made to wriggle and writhe.
It is monstrously face huggery in multiple ways, not in
(16:51):
body shape, but otherwise. Yes.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
The texture, the apparent texture here reminds me of various
images I've seen of like three D printed scaffolding for
like vatgrown organs, and like you know, it has that
kind of appear. It's kind of like if you three
D printed a shrimp and you really didn't want to
eat it. It also kind of has a zoidberg ye
look to it, with its various mouth parts. It looks
(17:16):
almost like it has like cuthulhuoid tentacles or something, So
it has a real kind of sinister vibe.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
I have to say. Now, there's another thing that is
both creepy and funny about it, which is not so
much about the organism itself, but about how I misunderstood
it when I was first looking at this picture. Because
one way I would have initially described this is it's
like a cavefish xenomor of shrimp dog with a broom
(17:45):
for a face. Because there is what I first interpreted
to be like a huge, long, bristly white beard shooting
straight out of the animal's head. But here's the thing
on the right side of the image. There, rob that
is not the animal's head. I was looking at it backwards.
The head is on the left. So an expert, you know,
(18:07):
somebody who knows amphipod biology, probably would not have made
this mistake. But just to add to the list of
weird things about it for the lay observer, the backside
doubles as a kind of ghostly veiled face and again
a little, you said, Cathu Lewy. I can see that
because the way you know, mind flavors are rendered with
like all the tentacles coming out of the face. When
(18:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
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 (18:50):
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
(19:13):
describe it as follows, a smooth dorsal body, twelve spines
on the outer maxilla, one plate, subsimilar and strongly subcelate
nathopods with broad carpus lobes. The periopods three and four
Dactyli are zero point forty five x of the respective
propodus and periopods five to seven dactili are zero point
(19:36):
six x, a distal spiniform process on the peduncle of
Europod one and an elongated but weakly cleft telson and
that al It's like, I don't know, sexy or something.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
It is sexy or something. Yes, the peduncle of europod one.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
I love it, but again you might not guess by
looking at it. One of the things that distinguishes this
is that for its environment, this is a fast moving animal,
a fast moving predator of the deep ocean, not an
ambling seafloor scrubber, but an active predator that chases down prey.
Typically it's prey being other amphipods. You might remember from
(20:18):
the poetry passage the nathopods that spelled g n A
t h opods. These are raptorial front appendages that the
animals used to hunt. So they'll dart through the water
and snatch the smaller cousins with these fore claws that
looks you can kind of imagine like the clause of
a praying mantis. You know, these folding fore claws that
(20:41):
can grab and then feed prey toward the mouth.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Strong elements of JABBERWOCKI I want to say to all
of the language involved in this description, Yeah, yeah, I
feel like the nathopods surely Outgrabe at one point or another.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yes, yes, I just had to look up the poem.
I couldn't remember the exact phrasing, but I see this
and I see sly the toes. But anyway, I just
thought this was so interesting looking at animals like this
(21:19):
and that we're still discovering these types of these animals,
these predators, because it reminds us how relatively little we
know about these extremely deep environments, especially super deep like
the Hadel Zone the deep ocean trenches. And one thing
that some authors writing about this discovery mentioned is that
(21:39):
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 2 (21:53):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, the idea of looking into dark, lightless oceans.
We have dark, lightless regions of our own ocean. And indeed,
one thing that becomes clear when you start reading more
about specific organisms is that we know more than we
ever have regarding these depths but there is still so
(22:16):
much mystery, and you know, it's just there are these
are places that are hard to get to, hard to
get eyes down there, you know, be they organic or mechanical.
And we've discussed in the past the complications that are
involved in bringing any kind of physical specimens up from
the deep. They may you know, explode and be damaged
(22:38):
in ways that don't apply as much to other organisms
you might collect. Many of these are very delicate as well.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Yeah, absolutely true. So there are a lot of challenges
to studying the biology and ecology of the deep ocean,
but there is a lot of interesting stuff we know,
and that's what we want to look at in the series,
specifically again focused on predators. What are preor is doing
down there, What challenges to predators in the deep deep
ocean face, and how do they make a living?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah? Yeah, so first and foremost we have to talk
just briefly, I think about temperature and pressure. We've discussed
the challenges of temperature and pressure and the deep ocean
before and stuff to blow your mind. But we're talking
about depths where sunlight does not reach and so too,
the sun's heat does not quite reach it. Geothermal sources
of heat acide. It's a realm of pretty chilling waters,
(23:30):
and to be on the ocean floor is to feel
the pressure of the water column on your back and
upon all sides of you at once. Actually, the pressure
at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is more than
a thousand times that of the pressure at sea level.
And meanwhile, the temperature down there is I've read on
the order of like one to four degrees celsius or
(23:51):
thirty four to thirty nine degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
So an extreme environment, and organisms that want to adapt
or evolve to survive there need to you need to
make some pretty radical investments.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
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
(24:25):
Earth's living environment. If you consider the hard surface of
a planet to be its core environment, so you know,
not just talking about the surface that we know, but
also the seafloor is being like the rocky surface, then
the ethhotic zone. The dark ocean is the majority of
the Earth. It's the realm. Alien observers might, by some
(24:47):
metric consider the default tearan environment, you know, like on
the rocky surface, covered by like crushing amounts of water
and out reach of sunlight.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, so like terrestrial animals by comparison, are just the
thing is living on certain mountaintops. That's right.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
The dark ocean entails the mesopo logic, the bathop logic,
and the abyssopalalgic and the deepest hatopelagic zone, which is
also known as the hatal zone. And again in the
darkness here there is diversity, there is life.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
But that doesn't mean life there is easy, and in
many ways in the deep ocean, animals may face some
challenges that you might not think of, not just the
cold and the darkness and the pressure, but maybe resource challenges.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
That's right. As pointed out by the likes of the NOAA,
the deep ocean is a kind of food desert. Sunlight
does not reach down to power photosynthesis, and so with
the exception of chemosynthetic communities masked in close proximity around
hydrothermal vents. These zones suffer from foods and this results
in an overall lack of density in organisms. The main
(26:04):
food sources that creatures in this region are going to
depend on, They're going to depend on predation among fellow inhabitants.
And then on the other hand, you also have the
periodic megafeasts that occur when you have whale fall, when
you have a particularly large organism that has died or
is killed in the waters above and sinks down steadily
(26:27):
towards the bottom. Now coming back to the Hadal zone specifically,
here again the absolute deepest of the dark ocean realms.
We're talking three point seven to six point eight miles
or six to eleven kilometers beneath the waves. We're also
talking about something that's a little different from the idea
of just like expansive deserts of depth. We're talking again
(26:50):
about long, narrow, topographic v shaped depressions. And so you
might well wonder, okay, well, given there comparatively limited horizontal footprint,
how often are there going to be sufficient falls, such
as a whale fall of some sort to feed the
Hatel zone. Again, if we were to think of it
(27:11):
in terms of like the surface world. Imagine you know
a topography and there's like a narrow canyon and they
are creatures that live at the bottom of that canyon.
How often is a big old condor or vulture going
to fall out of the sky and feed them, right?
So that's what I was, like, a long shot, Yeah, yeah,
I mean, it turns out maybe it's not that actually
(27:32):
that big of a big of a deal, But that
was my question that it was in my head, and
that's what led me to look around, and indeed I
found a paper by a desk Gupta at All from
twenty twenty four titled Depth and Predation Regulate Consumption of
Dolphin carcasses in the Hadel Zone. This is from Deep
(27:53):
Sea Research Part one Oceanographic Research papers. So they point
out that we've known about whale flight and smaller sized
food falls for more than three decades, and with that
the realization that these are important food sources for particularly
for the deep kicking up temporary and something I mean
(28:13):
also kind of not so temporary, as we'll discuss sea
floor environments around the bounty. But such events in the
Hadal zone were largely unknown and unstudied. So what did
the researchers here decide to do. They said, well, let's
orchestrate a couple of them. Let's drop some dead dolphins
down a couple of trenches and watch and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Oh okay, so this wouldn't be something that is totally artificial,
like it never happens in nature. It's just rare enough
that we know it's hard to like come across this naturally, right.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
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
(29:07):
the Mariana Trench for example. Yes, it's narrow compared to
the expanse of ocean around it, but we're still talking
about a feature that's five hundred miles long with an
average width of about forty three miles. But still no
hatl whale falls had ever been recorded. So that's why
in twenty twenty one, the researchers dunked a pair of
Fraser's dolphins, one down the Mariana Trench and the other
(29:30):
down the Philippine Basin.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Okay, so the reason that was not recorded before is
not because it doesn't happen, but because it's our limited
ability to look for it. Naturally happened exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Now I want to feature a little reminder here about
sort of the phases. There are generally four phases of
whale fall that are recognized by scientists. So, first of all,
what happens again dead whale of one size or another
sinks to the bottom and is now on the bottom
of the ocean, some up through another The first stage
(30:02):
is the mobile scavenger stage. Scavengers or necrophages arrive for
the soft tissues, and the resulting feast can last for
months or even over a year. It's going to ultimately
depend on the exact environment and the size of the bounty.
And one thing that is kind of fun to do
is to think about these two in terms of you know,
(30:25):
of a human scenario. Imagine prospectors discovering gold, oil, or
some other desired resource and are previously unoccupied or scarcely
occupied area. What sort of stages of development and then
abandonment end up occurring. Okay, cool, okay. So first the
mobile scavengers come. Then phase two is the enriched mint
(30:45):
opportunist stage. This is when we get heterotrophic fauna arriving
to colonize the surrounding sediments which are now infused with
organics from the whalefall as well as the exposed bones
of the whale. And this period can last months or
even years. The third phase is the breakdown phase. This
(31:10):
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 3 (31:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
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 (31:37):
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 2 (31:45):
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
(32:06):
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
(32:27):
the researchers observed both of the initial stages, which we
have to also point out do tend to overlap in
general and overlapped here as well. So there's not a
hard cutof there's nobody's blowing a whistle and saying, all right,
that's it, opportunistic scavengers, get out of here. We got
the next crew coming in. So what they observed with
phase one they had hatl amphipods, which we were just
(32:50):
talking about an example of that, as well as snail fish.
These were found occurring at the whale drop in the
Philippine Basin, and then just hadle amphipods. No snailfish at
the Mariana Trench drop. So without the predatory snail fish
in action, the scavengers, the scavenging amphipods at the Mariana
(33:13):
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 (33:22):
Ah okay, that's interesting. Yeah, So the presence of secondary
predators complicates how the initial resources are consumed. So the
way the dolphin falls down and you've got these amphipods,
you know, stripping, stripping the bones, eating all the soft tissue,
But then you also could have predators there that limit
(33:43):
the amphipod's ability to quickly consume the carcass.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
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
(34:11):
chemosynthetic community that typically typically follows. So larger whales would
presumably sustain larger environments for longer. But one of the
key ideas presented by the researchers here is that the
exact shape and timeframe of a given whale fall is
going to depend not only on the animals that sinks to,
(34:31):
the depths, the size of the carcass, but also on
the depth that it sinks to. You know, the exact location,
and you know what sort of like local deep ocean
environment is in play.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Oh well, that totally makes sense. The same way if
you like, well, i mean just on the surface, if
you drop a dead animal somewhere, what happens to it
afterwards would depend not only on what kind of the
food quality of that dead animal is, but where you
put it. So, you know, take a dead cow and
you put it in the middle of the desert, something
different is going to happen to it than if you
take that same dead cow and you put it, you know,
(35:06):
in the middle of the forest.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
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 (35:25):
Yeah, that's right, though I guess actually a better comparison
than what I said would be would be different versions
of a similar ecosystem, because here they're both talking about
they're dropping it into the Hadel Zone, So it would
be like dropping it into two different forests in different
places on the Earth, so similar kind of environments, but
still different local conditions and ecology.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
So again, outside of the vents like these and hydrothermal
vent communities, there's just a lot of distance down there
in the dark ocean, especially when you get into like
the Hadel Zone. And we see that in the various
ways that the denizens of the deep live their lives
in terms of reproduction, but also in terms of how
(36:08):
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 (36:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Is right right, And so for the remainder of this episode,
I wanted to talk about one example of a predator
of the deep of the deep ocean in general, but
also as we'll get into seemingly of the hadel zone
as well, and that is the general category of deep
(36:52):
sea sciphonophores. Now, we've talked about siphonophores on the show before,
and I know I've talked about easily the most famous
sciphonophoor on Adam alias Stupendium before that is the Portuguese
Man o War. This is not only the most famous
siphono four, it was the first described by science in
seventeen fifty eight and also essentially the only sciphono four
(37:16):
with a common name.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
I mean, how often do you get to bring up
a siphonophoor in conversation?
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yeah, because I mean, the thing about the Portuguese Man
of War is that it is a siphonofour that lives
at the surface of the water. It doesn't get any
closer to us unless it, you know, gets washed up
on the beach, as they may do, or if it
were to actually crawl up and like enter our houses
or something, which they're not doing. But yeah, siphonophores are
just so endlessly weird and wonderful. They're hydrozoans, and they
(37:45):
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
(38:07):
system with one of these critters you know, say, you know,
is a like a digestive system, or an arm or
a flotation bladder. Each of these is in fact an
individual zooid. So each zooid is a multicellular animal unto
itself that exists as part of a colonial hole, each
(38:28):
comprising an essential system of that whole. So to employ
an imperfect comparison here, if you know voltron, Voltron is
a large mech mecha robot that is made out of
smaller mecha lion robots, you know, that are piloted by humans.
And except in this situation, imagine that the lions that
(38:50):
form our voltron cannot exist separate from the hole. They
cannot live on their own, and in fact are not
just forming the legs and the arms and the torso
in the head, but are forming things like the reproductive system,
the vultron, digestive system and so forth. And generally the
layout you'll see with one of these siphonophores is you'll
(39:12):
have a section called the neumataphor, which provides buoyancy, and
this is very obvious with the Portuguese Man of War.
Then you have the nectosome, which is related to swimming,
and the siphosome, which is related to feeding, reproductive capabilities,
and defense. And they may seem like floaty and docile
(39:33):
that like, and especially this is the case this may
have seen the case with the Portuguese Man of War
because they are kind of tossed about by the wind
and the sea and are taken to certain extents, you know,
where the sea is sending them. But siphino forests in general,
they are predatory carnivores, and they are they're active predatory
(39:54):
carnivores in their own peculiar way.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
It's actually a more horrify kind of predation and even
than we're used to. You think a bit more like
the blob.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah, yeah, and it's like that level of just like
you look at the body layout of one of these,
and I guess they have more of a body layout
than the blob, but it's still vastly inhuman and non
mammalion non vertebrate, and even so different from the you know,
invertebrate worlds of other animals. You can't just turn it
(40:24):
around and say, oh, well that's the head and now
it makes sense. No, Siphonophors are like weird no matter
how you look at them.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
So one example of note here, the one will the
best defines the discussion here today is the giant sephon
a four or the prey a duvia. This is a
tube shaped sephona four that can reach lengths of up
to one hundred and thirty feet or forty meters. This
is frequently pointed out to be as long as a
blue whale, but also about as wide as a broom handle. What, yeah, that.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Just seems like an animal body of that or it
should not exist exactly.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
And this is like the only plays that could exist,
you know, where they can have they kind of have
the space to exist, but also they're ultimately delicate, dangerous
to the creatures that they consume, but delicate, and they
need a place where they're not going to be tossed
around by the by the sea. Down here, it's relatively quiet.
(41:22):
It's long tube like body maneuvers via pulsating meducie, and
one end features a gas filled noumataphor to provide buoyancy.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Okay, so it's got kind of a bubble that helps
it negotiate where it floats to, and then it's got
the pulsating you said, maneuvers with meducie. What are these
threadlike or hair like things that project off of it?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
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
(42:09):
a bit of illustrations of yokai that I've seen, particularly
the rokuro Kubi yokai, where it's like a woman with
a long snakelike neck, except in this case there's no body.
It's just it's just a strange creature to behold.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Super creepy, Yes, it's repulsion attraction reaction I'm having, like
I don't want to get near it, but also want
to wrap it around myself.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yes. Yeah, Now, in a vast and sparsely populated environment,
you've got to be swift, you got to be a patient,
or you've got to be attractive. And I guess the
giant Savana four seems to engage in a little bit
of both patient and attractive because, on one hand, it
uses bright blue bioluminescence to attract prey, and I'm to
(42:54):
understand that they, like most siphonophores, are also fairly selective
in this case, grab vitating to areas where favored prey
are present or will be present. You know, there's some
sort of they're going to go where the food is
going to be, and then it can grab with its
tentacles and sting with its nomaticists before passing the bits
(43:15):
of now food its prey onto the digestive zooids that
will carry on digestion.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
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 2 (43:34):
Well. I should first of all stress that blue green
light this tends to be the standard among bioluminescent animals
in the deep. Sometimes red light is used for a
different reason than we may get into later on. As
for what the siphonof war in question here is doing,
what is it mimicking? According to the Nterey Bay Aquarium's
(43:55):
Wonderful overview page on bioluminescence, there are siphonophores that use
this kind of bioluminescent lure to mimic the appearance of copods.
This is a common prey organism for deep sea fishes,
and so that seems to be what's probably going on here,
mimicking one prey animal to attract in predators which then
(44:19):
become the prey. Now, when it comes to the exact
zones that we find the giants, I found a four
in a lot of resources out there are pointing to
the zones above the Hatel zone, so still the deep
(44:42):
deep ocean, but not the deepest trenches. And yet on
the other hand, there is also evidence that they do
go into the Hatel waters or do reside there. Again,
we have to remind ourselves that we don't know everything
about these deep ocean trenches. They are mysterious places, and
a lot of those mysteries remain. A lot more research
(45:03):
and exploration is required, but there is some evidence that
we do find giant sciphonophors or some type of sciphonophoor
some related species in these waters, as we'll explain here.
And I was reading about this in a twenty twenty
one edition of the Journal of Plankton Research paper by
(45:25):
Alan J. Jamison and Thomas D. Linley, and they said
that we have observed a probable sciphonophour within the Mariana
Trench at a depth of eighty eight meters, which is
well within the Hadel zone. And I've included here for
you as well, Joe. It's it's image C of the
ABC image block that we're looking at here.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Ooh, okay, so we're looking at a cameras have captured
some stuff from the ocean floor and image C. It
just looks like we're looking out into this blue water
that's illuminated with our official light, of course, and then
there's something that looks almost like a constellation of little
little star like freckles kind of zipping around in a
(46:08):
strange arrangement.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, what we're seeing here, apparently is that trailing link
the siphosome. This is the part that is going to
ultimately be fishing for prey. The net is out, as
the authors here describe it. Again, we don't have enough
evidence here to really tell exactly what species we're looking at,
or you know, to make a case it is a
(46:30):
new species, but they say that it's very likely a
relative of the giant Sephono four, and it's probably a
member of the same suborder. Full identification could not be made,
but this evidence does seem to indicate that known and
maybe unknown species of siphonophores do hunt in hatel waters.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
That's a whole other kind of deep sea horror.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
And Yeah, one of the things I love about the
Sephonophores is that we I think, by you know, by
this point, I mean, everyone's seen a lot of like
really cool images of deep sea fish with their you know,
translucent bodies, their needle like teeth and bioluminescent bulges and
other strange properties. You're gonna make them very frightening. But
(47:15):
it's almost like that's an extrapolation of a fish, and
and we're prepared for that, but we're sometimes less prepared
for just how again how weird seiphonophores are, even though
we've also find siphonophores again at the surface of the
ocean up there with the Portuguese Man of Wars. But yeah,
they're these, like the giant siphonophor is just such a
(47:36):
strange creature. And the idea that there are things like
this just floating around and the deep ocean, uh, you know,
making their way towards the places where their favored prey
are found, and then casting their bioluminescent net in order
to draw them in and then sting them as they
brush up against them, and then pass them on to
(47:58):
their you know, specific colonial zooids that are going to
complete the digestion task.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
You'd have to think if one of those things get you,
you'd just be like, fair enough, digest me. Well, that
is a truly fascinating organism, and I think we're going
to have to call it there for today on part
one of this series, but we will be back with more.
We're not done talking about predation in the deepest parts
of the ocean. We'll have at least one more part
(48:28):
for you, maybe more.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
That's right, we'll be back with maybe with some expected
cases of deep sea predators, but also perhaps some unexpected
examples as well. All Right, in the meantime, we just
want to remind everyone that's stuffed auble. Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. We air a short form episode on Wednesdays,
and on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to
(48:49):
just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
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 su
us to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
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.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, we're going to be starting a discussion
about animal life in the deepest parts of the ocean,
specifically the deep ocean's predators, looking at what it takes
to be an active hunter in the deep. And I
thought a good place to start off with this series
(00:37):
would be the story that inspired me to look at
this topic, and that was the discovery last year of
a new species known as Delsabella common chaka. You may
have seen stories about this. It was covered in some
popular press, but the finding was described in a November
(00:58):
twenty twenty four paper published in the journal Systematics and
Biodiversity by Johanna Weston, Carolina Gonzales, Reuben Escribano, and Osvaldo Uloa,
and the paper was called a new large predator Amphibida
useyrite hidden at Haitl depths of the Atacama Trench. Now,
(01:19):
one of the things that really got my attention when
I was first reading about this was simply what this
animal looks like. We'll get to a physical description of
it in just a minute. But the other thing that
I thought was really interesting is the ecological question how
an animal like this makes its living in such an environment,
what it takes to be a predator so far down
(01:41):
in the ocean. And we'll be continuing to explore that
question as we as we move on in the series.
So the authors of this paper included scientists affiliated with
the Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in the United States and the
Instituto millenniody Oceanographia, which is based at the Universidad des
(02:01):
Concepcion in Chile. Now, again, this paper was marking the
discovery of a new species of oceanic predator, and the
name they gave to the new predator was del Sibella Kemanchaka.
And this is interesting for a number of reasons. I'll
do a full etymology in just a minute here, but
especially I wanted to draw attention to the species name Kemanchaka,
(02:25):
which I saw in several sources was derived from an
Andean language word, a word apparently in several of the
Indian languages meaning darkness, but apparently it has multiple meanings.
So kemanchaka also refers, according to the authors of this paper,
to quote a dense, low coastal fog that forms by
(02:46):
the Atacama Desert and moves inland. Kamanchakas was also the
name given to some of the littoral inhabitants of this
desertic region, so mysterious swirling ideas. There a name that
means fog, a kind of fog that rolls in, rolls
in around the desert. And then also darkness itself. Now
(03:08):
why would the species be named darkness, Well, it's because
Dulcibella kim and Chaka was discovered at a depth of
almost eight thousand meters in a place called the Atacama Trench.
This is a deep ocean trench basically following the contour
off the coast of South America from perud Icile and
(03:28):
it's roughly one hundred and sixty kilometers or about one
hundred miles off shore for most of its length. And
as we will probably continue to come back to in
this series, there are a lot of interesting things about
this sort of environment. Deep ocean trenches, sometimes called the
Hadle zone, can function kind of like islands do in biogeography.
(03:53):
They create a pocket of environmental conditions surrounded on all
sides by much different conditions where the ocean is less
deep all around them. Unless the pressure is different, the
temperature is different. And thus in these in these deep
deep zones surrounded by the less deep deep zones, they
can evolve unique isolated organisms and biological relationships. So ocean
(04:20):
trenches are in many ways like islands inverted, but with
unique features. For example, the kind of ecosystem that's possible
in a deep ocean trench is based in part on
what happens in the ocean above it, like what kind
of biological productivity takes place up there, and by consequence,
(04:41):
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 2 (04:58):
Yeah. Yeah, often refer to does the marine snow? I
think of it as kind of like the gray rainfall
of little pieces of flesh.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
The blessed rot that sustains us all. And in addition
to these interesting general qualities that the Autocoma Trench itself
is especially interesting and unique because of its relative isolation
from other deep ocean trenches. So to read from the
paper here, the authors say, quote the Hatel zone, or
the deepest forty five percent of the ocean from six
(05:32):
thousand to eleven thousand meters, has high levels of undiscovered biodiversity.
Most Hatel features are trenches formed at the subduction zone
between tectonic plates and shaped by a unique suite of
extrinsic and intrinsic factors. The Autocoma Trench, the southern sector
of the Peru Chile Trench, is one of the most
(05:53):
geographically isolated Hatel features and is situated below eutrophic surface
waters and cara rised by high sediment loads. The Atakoma
Trench is known to host a highly distinctive faunel community
driven by a combination of these isolating factors. So it's
not just the things that are true of these these
(06:15):
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 2 (06:32):
Kind of a Galapagos of the deep, perhaps to play
with that island comparison.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Now, just a side note here because it connected to
something we've talked about before. The authors give a nod
to important early work done in characterizing hadel fauna in
the nineteen sixties by expeditions of the First of all,
they mentioned the RV academic Corchetov, but then they also
mentioned the r V el Tanan. Yeah, we talked about
(07:00):
some deep otion surveys by the Eltannan in a series
we did about sort of anomalous imagery taken underwater that
people ended up saying had to be UFOs or some
kind of technology from the future or Atlantis or anything
like that. In this case, the thing was the el
tannin quote antenna. Many people have said, oh, yeah, this
(07:22):
has to be a piece of alien technology because it
looks like a radar array with these aerials coming up.
In fact, it is almost definitely a carnivorous sponge.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
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 (07:43):
So coming back to this newly discovered species, the new
species is an amphipod now amphipods are animals belonging to
the order Amphipida, which are crustaceans found in both marine
and freshwater environments, usually described as having laterally compressed bodies,
so you can think of them as taller than they
(08:05):
are wide, maybe like somebody put them in a vice
and squeeze their sides in. I've seen a number of
sources describe amphipods as looking shrimp like, and that does
describe some of them. Confusingly, shrimp are not amphipods, but
a lot of apipods do look shrimp like, though not
all of them. Some of them look more like weird
(08:25):
fantasy insects. For example, just one I found that I
thought was very visually striking. If you want a good
little freak out, look up the amphipod genus Epimeria epi
me r Ia with a few of the guys in
this genus. I get strong notes of the toxic jungle
from NAUSICAA.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Absolutely, and this one image that you shared in our
outline here, in particular, I found extra grotesque because if
I didn't know better, I would dismiss this image as
that sort of horrifying AI generated monster imagery that you
see where are these days? You know, the sort of
thing that is in and of itself unnerving and disturbing.
(09:05):
But I've also swiftly conditioned myself to abhor them all
the more because I know they're not the product of
a human mind or a human imagination. So just looking
at this image makes my stomach churn in weird ways,
and I end up not really knowing how I feel
about it. But of course this is not an AI
generated monstrosity. This isn't an actual denizen of the natural world.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
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
(09:49):
generated fake images of things and saying like new beasts
discovered in whatever, And you know, it's almost like they're
like they're trying to trick us into doing an episode
on this new beast discovered as so AI garbage. That's
like a fake image of some monster in a jungle.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, yeah, I don't like it.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I mean, in a way. I appreciate it because it's
so distasteful. I'm not even tempted to scroll the news
feed for a few seconds. I just immediately navigate away.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
But yeah, there's currently a sameness to so much of it,
and I guess I should appreciate that sameness. Swile it's
still there. If it gets harder to tell them, even
harder to classify them and categorize them as AI generated things,
then we're even We're in even more troubling waters.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, but back to real troubling waters, right.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
So.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Amphipods can be found in all over the place, many habitats.
They take many different forms. It seems the majority of
amphipods are scavengers. They eat decomposing organisms or whatever little
bits of organic detritis they come across. The new species
described in this paper, however, is an active predator. According
(11:00):
to the authors, it is the first large active predator
ever found this deep in the Atacoma Trench. Again, it
was the individuals collected here. We're at like seventy nine
hundred meters down. All the other amphipods previously identified in
this area have been scavengers. Though predatory amphipods have been
(11:20):
found in other ocean trenches on Earth. So the specimens
here were collected by a deep sea vehicle operated by
Chile's Integrated Deep Ocean Observing System in twenty twenty three,
there was like a they call it like a lander vehicle.
So it's like a thing that can go down and
collect collect specimens, collect baited traps and things like that.
(11:41):
And according to morphological and genetic analysis, this new predator
is not only a newly discovered species, but a newly
discovered genus. And here's where I wanted to get back
to both the etymology of the genus and species name,
but to a kind of interesting side note on taxonomic frustration.
So the authors originally tried to give this animal the
(12:04):
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 2 (12:14):
Yes, yes, Robert Doolay would have loved this, this choice
in genus name because the lyrics to don Quixote the
man a Lamacha musical. Rather, it goes like, you know, Dulcinea, dulcinea,
I see heaven when I see the Dulcinea.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
Okay, I don't know that one. It's a great musical, Okay,
I'll look it up. I've heard of it before, obviously,
but yeah, never, I've never seen it or listen. But
this this apparently, and so like trying to name this
genus after don Quixote was apparently following a pre existing
convention by which several other genera of deep sea amphipods
(12:52):
were named after characters from Servantes. So I've never read
don Quixote myself, so I didn't know who this character was,
and I was curious to look it up. The character
is called Dulcinea del Toboso and is a character that
is fictional or maybe better to say, imaginary, within the
narrative of the novel. So, the character don Quixote is,
(13:16):
you know, like a knight errant, and he thinks he
must have a lady to serve. So the way I
read it summarized is that he looks at a peasant
girl and then he kind of imagines a version of
her as this high born princess who is impossibly perfect
and worthy of his lance in every way, and so
he thinks of her as the ultimate all time milady.
(13:39):
And this character in his head he names Dulcinea del toboso.
Dulcinea derived from like dulce, the Latin word for sweet,
So this name would mean a superlative sweetness. And so,
together with what I already mentioned about the species name
cumunchaka meaning darkness, darkness in several indigenous and in languages,
(14:01):
this predatory amphipod's name basically means sweet darkness. It's like
the name of a necromancer's pet. And so this is
just even the name Dulcinea darkness. That sounds pretty great.
That's got some great noir vibes to it. Oh yeah,
it's like that saccharin goth thing. There's a lot of that,
a lot of that going on. And so this is
(14:23):
still basically what the animal is named. But remember I
was gonna mention taxonomic frustrations. So they were trying to
name the genus Dulcinea, but it turned out that name
had already been assigned to a genus of Coleoptera, I
mean beatles, a genus of beetles a long time ago,
I think over one hundred years ago. I don't even
know if that genus name is even used anymore, but
(14:45):
it had been assigned sometime in the past, and according
to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, you cannot reuse names,
so they had to change the name. They changed it
to Dulcibella, also a nickname derived from the word for
sweet or weakness, also basically meaning milady. And so now
we end up with dulcibella common chaka. Still, I think
(15:07):
you can still say sweet darkness.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
By the way, some of you might have noticed that
I said dulcinea earlier and not dulcinea. In the musical,
they say dulcinea, so I believe dulcinea is correct. So
I don't know. This is not a show that is
exclusively about musicals, though, so those are you more familiar
with Mana la mancha, perhaps you can write it about it.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
I think we also are bound to be forgiving of
pronunciation differences.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
I think Peter O'Toole sings it dulcinea in the nineteen
seventy two adaptation of the musical. But we're not talking
about Peter o'tool We're talking about the deep ocean.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Right, So I think it's finally time to talk about
the physical form of this creature. So Rob, I've attached
a photo for you to look at in the outline here. Again,
folks at home, if you want to look it up yourselves,
you can google Dulcabella kamon Chaka. The first thing I
have to acknowledge is what many other articles have already
(16:07):
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
(16:28):
some places looks kind of like a shrimp covered in
white goo. In other places looks like a translucent white
skin stretched over a bumpy landscape of I got some
things in there that look like vertebrae, little leg joints
and knobs that were just made to wriggle and writhe.
It is monstrously face huggery in multiple ways, not in
(16:51):
body shape, but otherwise. Yes.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
The texture, the apparent texture here reminds me of various
images I've seen of like three D printed scaffolding for
like vatgrown organs, and like you know, it has that
kind of appear. It's kind of like if you three
D printed a shrimp and you really didn't want to
eat it. It also kind of has a zoidberg ye
look to it, with its various mouth parts. It looks
(17:16):
almost like it has like cuthulhuoid tentacles or something, So
it has a real kind of sinister vibe.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
I have to say. Now, there's another thing that is
both creepy and funny about it, which is not so
much about the organism itself, but about how I misunderstood
it when I was first looking at this picture. Because
one way I would have initially described this is it's
like a cavefish xenomor of shrimp dog with a broom
(17:45):
for a face. Because there is what I first interpreted
to be like a huge, long, bristly white beard shooting
straight out of the animal's head. But here's the thing
on the right side of the image. There, rob that
is not the animal's head. I was looking at it backwards.
The head is on the left. So an expert, you know,
(18:07):
somebody who knows amphipod biology, probably would not have made
this mistake. But just to add to the list of
weird things about it for the lay observer, the backside
doubles as a kind of ghostly veiled face and again
a little, you said, Cathu Lewy. I can see that
because the way you know, mind flavors are rendered with
like all the tentacles coming out of the face. When
(18:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
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 (18:50):
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
(19:13):
describe it as follows, a smooth dorsal body, twelve spines
on the outer maxilla, one plate, subsimilar and strongly subcelate
nathopods with broad carpus lobes. The periopods three and four
Dactyli are zero point forty five x of the respective
propodus and periopods five to seven dactili are zero point
(19:36):
six x, a distal spiniform process on the peduncle of
Europod one and an elongated but weakly cleft telson and
that al It's like, I don't know, sexy or something.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
It is sexy or something. Yes, the peduncle of europod one.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
I love it, but again you might not guess by
looking at it. One of the things that distinguishes this
is that for its environment, this is a fast moving animal,
a fast moving predator of the deep ocean, not an
ambling seafloor scrubber, but an active predator that chases down prey.
Typically it's prey being other amphipods. You might remember from
(20:18):
the poetry passage the nathopods that spelled g n A
t h opods. These are raptorial front appendages that the
animals used to hunt. So they'll dart through the water
and snatch the smaller cousins with these fore claws that
looks you can kind of imagine like the clause of
a praying mantis. You know, these folding fore claws that
(20:41):
can grab and then feed prey toward the mouth.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Strong elements of JABBERWOCKI I want to say to all
of the language involved in this description, Yeah, yeah, I
feel like the nathopods surely Outgrabe at one point or another.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yes, yes, I just had to look up the poem.
I couldn't remember the exact phrasing, but I see this
and I see sly the toes. But anyway, I just
thought this was so interesting looking at animals like this
(21:19):
and that we're still discovering these types of these animals,
these predators, because it reminds us how relatively little we
know about these extremely deep environments, especially super deep like
the Hadel Zone the deep ocean trenches. And one thing
that some authors writing about this discovery mentioned is that
(21:39):
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 2 (21:53):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, the idea of looking into dark, lightless oceans.
We have dark, lightless regions of our own ocean. And indeed,
one thing that becomes clear when you start reading more
about specific organisms is that we know more than we
ever have regarding these depths but there is still so
(22:16):
much mystery, and you know, it's just there are these
are places that are hard to get to, hard to
get eyes down there, you know, be they organic or mechanical.
And we've discussed in the past the complications that are
involved in bringing any kind of physical specimens up from
the deep. They may you know, explode and be damaged
(22:38):
in ways that don't apply as much to other organisms
you might collect. Many of these are very delicate as well.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Yeah, absolutely true. So there are a lot of challenges
to studying the biology and ecology of the deep ocean,
but there is a lot of interesting stuff we know,
and that's what we want to look at in the series,
specifically again focused on predators. What are preor is doing
down there, What challenges to predators in the deep deep
ocean face, and how do they make a living?
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah? Yeah, so first and foremost we have to talk
just briefly, I think about temperature and pressure. We've discussed
the challenges of temperature and pressure and the deep ocean
before and stuff to blow your mind. But we're talking
about depths where sunlight does not reach and so too,
the sun's heat does not quite reach it. Geothermal sources
of heat acide. It's a realm of pretty chilling waters,
(23:30):
and to be on the ocean floor is to feel
the pressure of the water column on your back and
upon all sides of you at once. Actually, the pressure
at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is more than
a thousand times that of the pressure at sea level.
And meanwhile, the temperature down there is I've read on
the order of like one to four degrees celsius or
(23:51):
thirty four to thirty nine degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
So an extreme environment, and organisms that want to adapt
or evolve to survive there need to you need to
make some pretty radical investments.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
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
(24:25):
Earth's living environment. If you consider the hard surface of
a planet to be its core environment, so you know,
not just talking about the surface that we know, but
also the seafloor is being like the rocky surface, then
the ethhotic zone. The dark ocean is the majority of
the Earth. It's the realm. Alien observers might, by some
(24:47):
metric consider the default tearan environment, you know, like on
the rocky surface, covered by like crushing amounts of water
and out reach of sunlight.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, so like terrestrial animals by comparison, are just the
thing is living on certain mountaintops. That's right.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
The dark ocean entails the mesopo logic, the bathop logic,
and the abyssopalalgic and the deepest hatopelagic zone, which is
also known as the hatal zone. And again in the
darkness here there is diversity, there is life.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
But that doesn't mean life there is easy, and in
many ways in the deep ocean, animals may face some
challenges that you might not think of, not just the
cold and the darkness and the pressure, but maybe resource challenges.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
That's right. As pointed out by the likes of the NOAA,
the deep ocean is a kind of food desert. Sunlight
does not reach down to power photosynthesis, and so with
the exception of chemosynthetic communities masked in close proximity around
hydrothermal vents. These zones suffer from foods and this results
in an overall lack of density in organisms. The main
(26:04):
food sources that creatures in this region are going to
depend on, They're going to depend on predation among fellow inhabitants.
And then on the other hand, you also have the
periodic megafeasts that occur when you have whale fall, when
you have a particularly large organism that has died or
is killed in the waters above and sinks down steadily
(26:27):
towards the bottom. Now coming back to the Hadal zone specifically,
here again the absolute deepest of the dark ocean realms.
We're talking three point seven to six point eight miles
or six to eleven kilometers beneath the waves. We're also
talking about something that's a little different from the idea
of just like expansive deserts of depth. We're talking again
(26:50):
about long, narrow, topographic v shaped depressions. And so you
might well wonder, okay, well, given there comparatively limited horizontal footprint,
how often are there going to be sufficient falls, such
as a whale fall of some sort to feed the
Hatel zone. Again, if we were to think of it
(27:11):
in terms of like the surface world. Imagine you know
a topography and there's like a narrow canyon and they
are creatures that live at the bottom of that canyon.
How often is a big old condor or vulture going
to fall out of the sky and feed them, right?
So that's what I was, like, a long shot, Yeah, yeah,
I mean, it turns out maybe it's not that actually
(27:32):
that big of a big of a deal, But that
was my question that it was in my head, and
that's what led me to look around, and indeed I
found a paper by a desk Gupta at All from
twenty twenty four titled Depth and Predation Regulate Consumption of
Dolphin carcasses in the Hadel Zone. This is from Deep
(27:53):
Sea Research Part one Oceanographic Research papers. So they point
out that we've known about whale flight and smaller sized
food falls for more than three decades, and with that
the realization that these are important food sources for particularly
for the deep kicking up temporary and something I mean
(28:13):
also kind of not so temporary, as we'll discuss sea
floor environments around the bounty. But such events in the
Hadal zone were largely unknown and unstudied. So what did
the researchers here decide to do. They said, well, let's
orchestrate a couple of them. Let's drop some dead dolphins
down a couple of trenches and watch and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
Oh okay, so this wouldn't be something that is totally artificial,
like it never happens in nature. It's just rare enough
that we know it's hard to like come across this naturally, right.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
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
(29:07):
the Mariana Trench for example. Yes, it's narrow compared to
the expanse of ocean around it, but we're still talking
about a feature that's five hundred miles long with an
average width of about forty three miles. But still no
hatl whale falls had ever been recorded. So that's why
in twenty twenty one, the researchers dunked a pair of
Fraser's dolphins, one down the Mariana Trench and the other
(29:30):
down the Philippine Basin.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Okay, so the reason that was not recorded before is
not because it doesn't happen, but because it's our limited
ability to look for it. Naturally happened exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Now I want to feature a little reminder here about
sort of the phases. There are generally four phases of
whale fall that are recognized by scientists. So, first of all,
what happens again dead whale of one size or another
sinks to the bottom and is now on the bottom
of the ocean, some up through another The first stage
(30:02):
is the mobile scavenger stage. Scavengers or necrophages arrive for
the soft tissues, and the resulting feast can last for
months or even over a year. It's going to ultimately
depend on the exact environment and the size of the bounty.
And one thing that is kind of fun to do
is to think about these two in terms of you know,
(30:25):
of a human scenario. Imagine prospectors discovering gold, oil, or
some other desired resource and are previously unoccupied or scarcely
occupied area. What sort of stages of development and then
abandonment end up occurring. Okay, cool, okay. So first the
mobile scavengers come. Then phase two is the enriched mint
(30:45):
opportunist stage. This is when we get heterotrophic fauna arriving
to colonize the surrounding sediments which are now infused with
organics from the whalefall as well as the exposed bones
of the whale. And this period can last months or
even years. The third phase is the breakdown phase. This
(31:10):
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 3 (31:24):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
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 (31:37):
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 2 (31:45):
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
(32:06):
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
(32:27):
the researchers observed both of the initial stages, which we
have to also point out do tend to overlap in
general and overlapped here as well. So there's not a
hard cutof there's nobody's blowing a whistle and saying, all right,
that's it, opportunistic scavengers, get out of here. We got
the next crew coming in. So what they observed with
phase one they had hatl amphipods, which we were just
(32:50):
talking about an example of that, as well as snail fish.
These were found occurring at the whale drop in the
Philippine Basin, and then just hadle amphipods. No snailfish at
the Mariana Trench drop. So without the predatory snail fish
in action, the scavengers, the scavenging amphipods at the Mariana
(33:13):
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 (33:22):
Ah okay, that's interesting. Yeah, So the presence of secondary
predators complicates how the initial resources are consumed. So the
way the dolphin falls down and you've got these amphipods,
you know, stripping, stripping the bones, eating all the soft tissue,
But then you also could have predators there that limit
(33:43):
the amphipod's ability to quickly consume the carcass.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
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
(34:11):
chemosynthetic community that typically typically follows. So larger whales would
presumably sustain larger environments for longer. But one of the
key ideas presented by the researchers here is that the
exact shape and timeframe of a given whale fall is
going to depend not only on the animals that sinks to,
(34:31):
the depths, the size of the carcass, but also on
the depth that it sinks to. You know, the exact location,
and you know what sort of like local deep ocean
environment is in play.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
Oh well, that totally makes sense. The same way if
you like, well, i mean just on the surface, if
you drop a dead animal somewhere, what happens to it
afterwards would depend not only on what kind of the
food quality of that dead animal is, but where you
put it. So, you know, take a dead cow and
you put it in the middle of the desert, something
different is going to happen to it than if you
take that same dead cow and you put it, you know,
(35:06):
in the middle of the forest.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
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 (35:25):
Yeah, that's right, though I guess actually a better comparison
than what I said would be would be different versions
of a similar ecosystem, because here they're both talking about
they're dropping it into the Hadel Zone, So it would
be like dropping it into two different forests in different
places on the Earth, so similar kind of environments, but
still different local conditions and ecology.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
So again, outside of the vents like these and hydrothermal
vent communities, there's just a lot of distance down there
in the dark ocean, especially when you get into like
the Hadel Zone. And we see that in the various
ways that the denizens of the deep live their lives
in terms of reproduction, but also in terms of how
(36:08):
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 (36:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Is right right, And so for the remainder of this episode,
I wanted to talk about one example of a predator
of the deep of the deep ocean in general, but
also as we'll get into seemingly of the hadel zone
as well, and that is the general category of deep
(36:52):
sea sciphonophores. Now, we've talked about siphonophores on the show before,
and I know I've talked about easily the most famous
sciphonophoor on Adam alias Stupendium before that is the Portuguese
Man o War. This is not only the most famous
siphono four, it was the first described by science in
seventeen fifty eight and also essentially the only sciphono four
(37:16):
with a common name.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
I mean, how often do you get to bring up
a siphonophoor in conversation?
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yeah, because I mean, the thing about the Portuguese Man
of War is that it is a siphonofour that lives
at the surface of the water. It doesn't get any
closer to us unless it, you know, gets washed up
on the beach, as they may do, or if it
were to actually crawl up and like enter our houses
or something, which they're not doing. But yeah, siphonophores are
just so endlessly weird and wonderful. They're hydrozoans, and they
(37:45):
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
(38:07):
system with one of these critters you know, say, you know,
is a like a digestive system, or an arm or
a flotation bladder. Each of these is in fact an
individual zooid. So each zooid is a multicellular animal unto
itself that exists as part of a colonial hole, each
(38:28):
comprising an essential system of that whole. So to employ
an imperfect comparison here, if you know voltron, Voltron is
a large mech mecha robot that is made out of
smaller mecha lion robots, you know, that are piloted by humans.
And except in this situation, imagine that the lions that
(38:50):
form our voltron cannot exist separate from the hole. They
cannot live on their own, and in fact are not
just forming the legs and the arms and the torso
in the head, but are forming things like the reproductive system,
the vultron, digestive system and so forth. And generally the
layout you'll see with one of these siphonophores is you'll
(39:12):
have a section called the neumataphor, which provides buoyancy, and
this is very obvious with the Portuguese Man of War.
Then you have the nectosome, which is related to swimming,
and the siphosome, which is related to feeding, reproductive capabilities,
and defense. And they may seem like floaty and docile
(39:33):
that like, and especially this is the case this may
have seen the case with the Portuguese Man of War
because they are kind of tossed about by the wind
and the sea and are taken to certain extents, you know,
where the sea is sending them. But siphino forests in general,
they are predatory carnivores, and they are they're active predatory
(39:54):
carnivores in their own peculiar way.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
It's actually a more horrify kind of predation and even
than we're used to. You think a bit more like
the blob.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah, yeah, and it's like that level of just like
you look at the body layout of one of these,
and I guess they have more of a body layout
than the blob, but it's still vastly inhuman and non
mammalion non vertebrate, and even so different from the you know,
invertebrate worlds of other animals. You can't just turn it
(40:24):
around and say, oh, well that's the head and now
it makes sense. No, Siphonophors are like weird no matter
how you look at them.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
So one example of note here, the one will the
best defines the discussion here today is the giant sephon
a four or the prey a duvia. This is a
tube shaped sephona four that can reach lengths of up
to one hundred and thirty feet or forty meters. This
is frequently pointed out to be as long as a
blue whale, but also about as wide as a broom handle. What, yeah, that.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Just seems like an animal body of that or it
should not exist exactly.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
And this is like the only plays that could exist,
you know, where they can have they kind of have
the space to exist, but also they're ultimately delicate, dangerous
to the creatures that they consume, but delicate, and they
need a place where they're not going to be tossed
around by the by the sea. Down here, it's relatively quiet.
(41:22):
It's long tube like body maneuvers via pulsating meducie, and
one end features a gas filled noumataphor to provide buoyancy.
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Okay, so it's got kind of a bubble that helps
it negotiate where it floats to, and then it's got
the pulsating you said, maneuvers with meducie. What are these
threadlike or hair like things that project off of it?
Speaker 2 (41:44):
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
(42:09):
a bit of illustrations of yokai that I've seen, particularly
the rokuro Kubi yokai, where it's like a woman with
a long snakelike neck, except in this case there's no body.
It's just it's just a strange creature to behold.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Super creepy, Yes, it's repulsion attraction reaction I'm having, like
I don't want to get near it, but also want
to wrap it around myself.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yes. Yeah, Now, in a vast and sparsely populated environment,
you've got to be swift, you got to be a patient,
or you've got to be attractive. And I guess the
giant Savana four seems to engage in a little bit
of both patient and attractive because, on one hand, it
uses bright blue bioluminescence to attract prey, and I'm to
(42:54):
understand that they, like most siphonophores, are also fairly selective
in this case, grab vitating to areas where favored prey
are present or will be present. You know, there's some
sort of they're going to go where the food is
going to be, and then it can grab with its
tentacles and sting with its nomaticists before passing the bits
(43:15):
of now food its prey onto the digestive zooids that
will carry on digestion.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
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 2 (43:34):
Well. I should first of all stress that blue green
light this tends to be the standard among bioluminescent animals
in the deep. Sometimes red light is used for a
different reason than we may get into later on. As
for what the siphonof war in question here is doing,
what is it mimicking? According to the Nterey Bay Aquarium's
(43:55):
Wonderful overview page on bioluminescence, there are siphonophores that use
this kind of bioluminescent lure to mimic the appearance of copods.
This is a common prey organism for deep sea fishes,
and so that seems to be what's probably going on here,
mimicking one prey animal to attract in predators which then
(44:19):
become the prey. Now, when it comes to the exact
zones that we find the giants, I found a four
in a lot of resources out there are pointing to
the zones above the Hatel zone, so still the deep
(44:42):
deep ocean, but not the deepest trenches. And yet on
the other hand, there is also evidence that they do
go into the Hatel waters or do reside there. Again,
we have to remind ourselves that we don't know everything
about these deep ocean trenches. They are mysterious places, and
a lot of those mysteries remain. A lot more research
(45:03):
and exploration is required, but there is some evidence that
we do find giant sciphonophors or some type of sciphonophoor
some related species in these waters, as we'll explain here.
And I was reading about this in a twenty twenty
one edition of the Journal of Plankton Research paper by
(45:25):
Alan J. Jamison and Thomas D. Linley, and they said
that we have observed a probable sciphonophour within the Mariana
Trench at a depth of eighty eight meters, which is
well within the Hadel zone. And I've included here for
you as well, Joe. It's it's image C of the
ABC image block that we're looking at here.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Ooh, okay, so we're looking at a cameras have captured
some stuff from the ocean floor and image C. It
just looks like we're looking out into this blue water
that's illuminated with our official light, of course, and then
there's something that looks almost like a constellation of little
little star like freckles kind of zipping around in a
(46:08):
strange arrangement.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, what we're seeing here, apparently is that trailing link
the siphosome. This is the part that is going to
ultimately be fishing for prey. The net is out, as
the authors here describe it. Again, we don't have enough
evidence here to really tell exactly what species we're looking at,
or you know, to make a case it is a
(46:30):
new species, but they say that it's very likely a
relative of the giant Sephono four, and it's probably a
member of the same suborder. Full identification could not be made,
but this evidence does seem to indicate that known and
maybe unknown species of siphonophores do hunt in hatel waters.
Speaker 3 (46:50):
That's a whole other kind of deep sea horror.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
And Yeah, one of the things I love about the
Sephonophores is that we I think, by you know, by
this point, I mean, everyone's seen a lot of like
really cool images of deep sea fish with their you know,
translucent bodies, their needle like teeth and bioluminescent bulges and
other strange properties. You're gonna make them very frightening. But
(47:15):
it's almost like that's an extrapolation of a fish, and
and we're prepared for that, but we're sometimes less prepared
for just how again how weird seiphonophores are, even though
we've also find siphonophores again at the surface of the
ocean up there with the Portuguese Man of Wars. But yeah,
they're these, like the giant siphonophor is just such a
(47:36):
strange creature. And the idea that there are things like
this just floating around and the deep ocean, uh, you know,
making their way towards the places where their favored prey
are found, and then casting their bioluminescent net in order
to draw them in and then sting them as they
brush up against them, and then pass them on to
(47:58):
their you know, specific colonial zooids that are going to
complete the digestion task.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
You'd have to think if one of those things get you,
you'd just be like, fair enough, digest me. Well, that
is a truly fascinating organism, and I think we're going
to have to call it there for today on part
one of this series, but we will be back with more.
We're not done talking about predation in the deepest parts
of the ocean. We'll have at least one more part
(48:28):
for you, maybe more.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
That's right, we'll be back with maybe with some expected
cases of deep sea predators, but also perhaps some unexpected
examples as well. All Right, in the meantime, we just
want to remind everyone that's stuffed auble. Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. We air a short form episode on Wednesdays,
and on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to
(48:49):
just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
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 su
us to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
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.
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