Deep Sea News

When I started this deep-sea biologist gig, my wife asked me if going to sea be would dangerous. I lied and said no but not that she believed me anyway. A short list includes:

1. Falling overboard and being lost at sea
   
2. A submersible failing to return to the surface
   
3. Running out of air in a submersible I
4. njury or death due to accidents with large sampling equipment on deck
   
5. A minor or severe injury being complicated by the lack of medical personal at sea
   
6. Rough seas
   
7. And the newly added slicing your abdomen open with a chef’s knife.
   

I could go on but you should be able to get the picture. Luckily, several precautions are taken and crews trained to avoid these situations. However, the one that fascinates me the most is not necessarily easily prepared for. Rogue waves.

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Exterior view of Phoenix 1000. Photo from U.S. Submarines

Regular readers of DSN know that Peter and I try to provide all the latest information on all the newest vessels. Regular readers will also know Peter and I have had little success raising the necessary funds from you are readers to purchase any of them. Well here is the next plea and rest assured it will not be the last. Peter and I need $78,000,000 to purchase the Phoenix 1000.

The Phoenix 1000 is a 65-meter (213′) personal luxury submarine…As proposed, the submarine would constitute the single largest private undersea vehicle ever built, and arguably, one of the most significant personal transportation devices of the century…The total interior area of the submarine is in excess of 460 square meters (5000 square feet). The significant volume, coupled with very large acrylic viewports, and the potential for relatively large open spaces, results in a vehicle as luxurious as the finest of motor yachts.

Thats 5,000 sq ft of luxurious underwater living. That is 5.5 times my current apartment size. Of course the downside is that I that I will need to work the next 1,950 years to pay it off.

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The twilight zone is a section of water extending from the euphotic zone down to 1000m. A new study demonstrates that this region acts like a gate and that little makes it to the seafloor.

…carbon dioxide –taken up by photosynthesizing marine plants in the sunlit ocean surface layer–does not necessarily sink to the depths, where it is stored and prevented from re-entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Instead, organisms in the twilight zone consume the material (50-80%) long before it reaches the murky depths. Understanding these processes are important for predicting the role of the deep ocean in sequestering carbon for long geological times.

“Unless the carbon that gets into the ocean goes all the way down into the deep ocean and is stored there, the carbon can still make its way back into the atmosphere. Without this long-term storage, there is little influence on atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that impacts the earth’s climate.”

image from Science Daily

This crystal was recovered from the preserved tissue of a bamboo coral collected from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in the 1850’s. Bamboo corals are deep-sea gorgonians (or sea fans) in the family Isididae. They can be found as deep as 3500m in the Northeast Pacific. This particular bamboo coral is stored in the archives of the Invertebrate Zoology Department at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

The crystal in the image is about 100 microns across, or one-tenth of a millimeter. On the right you’ll see the laminar tuberculated texture of a tiny calcareous ‘bone’ called a sclerite. Sclerites are found in the coenenchyme and polyps of the octocoral colony. Sclerites are diagnostic structures used to identify and describe octocoral species.

The image was taken by Peter Etnoyer using the Smithsonian’s Amray brand Scanning Electron Microscope.

Approximately 55 million years ago it was very bad to be a deep-sea animal. First the ocean temperature was rising. At the surface, temperatures rose anywhere from 5-10 degrees and in the deep around 5 degrees. The chemistry of the water also changed significantly. Oxygen became depleted. The ocean became more acidic. Global currents were altered such that deep-water upwelled in the Northern Hemisphere instead of the Southern for ~100,000 years.

This event is used to mark the end of the Paleocene and the start of the Eocene and thus the event is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. A old instructor of mine use to refer to it as the P.E. S*&^ Storm. I digress but you get the point.

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Stauromedusae are not entirely uncommon, but not entirely common either. In fact “stalked jellyfish”, as they are sometimes known, are very rare in the deep sea and only about 50 species are described (5). Only one other has been reported from abyssal depths (Lucernaria bathyphila). These strange jellies are making more appearances along the East Pacific Rise.

“A Lucernaria … may be compared in form to a goblet or a funnel with double walls” (6)

Description L. janetae was described in 2005 from specimens at 8N on the East Pacific Rise and named in honor of Janet Voight, the chief scientist of the expedition and curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum. It is large for a stauromedusan at up to 10 cm wide (minus the peduncle, or “stalk”), kind of like a gelatinous softball… or a large gelatinous wine glass perhaps? Most stauromedusae are less than 5cm long (5).



Its color is white, slightly transparent with orangish-pinkish gonad. The peduncle is single-chambered, which is interesting since most stauromedusae have 4 chambered peduncles (1). The “bell” part is separated into 4 septa, each with 2 bundles of about 100 tentacles held above the margin of the bell.

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It appears that the vessel rolled in heavy seas while the chef was slicing food causing a knife to lacerate his abdomen.

From iafrica.com

Mr. Leatherback reports that we have a winner in the Great Turtle Race. A sea-turtle named Billie made the trek from Coast Rica to the Galapagos in ten days. Billie was sponsored by the Offield Center for Billfish Studies.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s “Turtleocity” set the record for deepest diving turtle in the race with an incredible dive to 2,789 ft (850m)! Wow. There be jellies, we presume.

Read more here.

In the past, I have made the statement on DSN that there can be no such thing as a sustainable deep-sea fishery. My reasons for this are that

1. Deep-sea fish are slow growing and long lived due to the cold temperatures of deep water. 
   
2. This results in low turnover, or replacement, of commercially important, large individuals in the population. In other words, we harvest fishy grandmothers and grandfathers and we have to wait awhile  before a new batch of grandparents comes around.  Hey grandparents just don’t grow on trees!
3. While we could theoretically have a healthy fishery the turnover rates are so low that it could never be commerically viable.

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Thresher and others publish a paper indicating the situation may be more dire. 

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If you want to know where the good surf spots are sure you could ask your local bro’, or you could gather some geologist and map the seafloor at high resolution. Sure the first might cost you at most a cigarette and beer while the latter requires a multiyear grant that rivals the budget of a third world country. I still vote for the mapping. Those of you who surf already know about the Mavericks a big wave break off Half Moon Bay in Central Cali. The spot attracts only the best riders where waves can crest over 50 feet. Let us not forget the freezing water and jagged rocks.

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