30 May 2017
By Chelsea Whyte
It’s like going back in time. NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer has completed more than two weeks of ocean exploration beginning near Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, and ending near Honolulu in Hawaii. Some of the animal behaviour it recorded has previously been documented only in fossils hundreds of millions of years old.
“For all of the places we went, it was the first time we were getting to have eyes down in the deep sea,” says Scott France, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who was on the ship.
Those eyes come in the form of remote submersibles that light up the sea floor and transmit live video to the team and the public around the world.
By Chelsea Whyte
It’s like going back in time. NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer has completed more than two weeks of ocean exploration beginning near Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa, and ending near Honolulu in Hawaii. Some of the animal behaviour it recorded has previously been documented only in fossils hundreds of millions of years old.
“For all of the places we went, it was the first time we were getting to have eyes down in the deep sea,” says Scott France, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who was on the ship.
Those eyes come in the form of remote submersibles that light up the sea floor and transmit live video to the team and the public around the world.
“We saw brittle stars capturing a squid from the water column while it was swimming. I didn’t know that was possible. And then there was a tussle among the brittle stars to see who got to have the squid,” says France.
Living fossils
The team also saw snails attached to crinoids, sometimes called sea lillies for their graceful branches.
“We saw this amazing footage of the snail that seemed to be eating a crinoid. No one had seen this before,” says Del Bohnenstiehl at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, a geologist on the ship. “A scientist from the Smithsonian said he had seen it in the fossil record, but never live.”
Continued and video
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