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Little Creatures of the Deep [Slide Show]

A new robot successfully traps the larvae of exotic species living in the extremely deep ocean

At more than 2,150 meters deep in the ocean, the water pressure is a crushing 220 kilograms per square centimeter. Oceanographers who have tried to snag samples of life in these pitch-black, frigid and high-pressure places have had to suck in water at high speed and try to filter out organisms, often damaging them in the process. But a team led by Duke University, the University of Oregon and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last week snatched up the intact larvae of 16 different animals.

The scientists used a new sampler, called SyPRID, which was carried to great depths by an autonomous underwater vehicle named Sentry. For more than eight hours engineers steered the robot in a precise and slow pattern. The maneuvering itself marked an achievement by barely disturbing the water in front of the craft—a common complication that pushes the tiny larvae out of a vehicle’s path before an instrument can pull them in. The long, cylindrical sampler processed large volumes of water every hour, yet did it slowly enough to not harm the fragile creatures, which are only a few hundred microns across. The final trick, according to an e-mail from Carl Kaiser, the vehicle program manager at Woods Hole, “is getting most of the larvae down to a relatively still area where they are further protected from the moving water.”

Scientists are eager to have intact specimens of common and rare organisms from the very deep ocean, especially in the early larval stages of life, because the samples can explain a lot about marine food webs, the changing nature of ocean ecosystems and how methane seeping up from the seafloor may be affecting the chemistry of the sea.


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Two images of Sentry and SyPRID and nine images of the beautiful larvae can be seen in the accompanying slide show (see link below). Captions are based on descriptions by Laurel Hiebert, a team member at the University of Oregon. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

This article was updated from the original version on July 31, 2015.

 

Mark Fischetti has been a senior editor at Scientific American for 17 years and has covered sustainability issues, including climate, weather, environment, energy, food, water, biodiversity, population, and more. He assigns and edits feature articles, commentaries and news by journalists and scientists and also writes in those formats. He edits History, the magazine's department looking at science advances throughout time. He was founding managing editor of two spinoff magazines: Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0. His 2001 freelance article for the magazine, "Drowning New Orleans," predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. His video What Happens to Your Body after You Die?, has more than 12 million views on YouTube. Fischetti has written freelance articles for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Fast Company, and many others. He co-authored the book Weaving the Web with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum Magazine and of Family Business Magazine. He has a physics degree and has twice served as the Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2021 he received the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, which celebrates a career of outstanding reporting on the Earth and space sciences. He has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, CNN, the History Channel, NPR News and many news radio stations. Follow Fischetti on X (formerly Twitter) @markfischetti

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