Transcript: Creatures of the Deep

Dr Helen Scales  0:04  

So we started on the research ship. We’re way offshore. The ocean, is 1000s of meters beneath the deck, and we put our robot in the ocean, this massive, car sized machine that’s going to be our eyes and ears and hands in the deep, but we’ve also clasped in its hand a dead alligator which had never been done before. So we watched this alligator disappear down beneath the waves, this robot sinking down with it.

And we waited until the cameras came on, and we ran back into the control room and could look at the screens, which is the video coming up from this robot as it’s sinking down into the deep and we can see that the water at first is green and there’s light, but quite quickly it’s getting darker. We can see the sunlight is running out all around it as it’s sinking down and down. It took an hour for it to reach our destination, which was a 2000 meters down on the seabed, on the abyss. These abyssal planes just big, undulating, muddy seabed, and we finally saw the robot landing down on the sea bed, and then we lay the alligator down on the sea bed, and we left it there, and we came back a day later, went back down, and we didn’t know what we were gonna see. It was really exciting. It’s one of those things you just think, oh, you know, what could be, will it just, will have anything found it? Will it be, will it be still there? And the camera panned around across the sea bed, you know, just imagine that what you can see is as far as the lights can go, and there on the sea bed is our alligator. It’s still there, but it’s been found, and it’s covered in these giant scavenging crustaceans called isoquads, giant isocods. Imagine an animal the size and almost the shape of a rugby ball. Pale pink in color, an odd color for the deep you might think. But yeah, pale pink. They look like wood lice. They’re actually relatives of wood lice that you would see on land, you know, under a flower pot or scuttling across the garden. But massive, they’re huge, and they were, they were eating this alligator. They found they’d clearly smelt it. I imagine there was probably chemicals in the water wafting away from this de slowly decomposing body. And they’d found the softer parts of it to start eating, and then they were really getting into it, because they’re scavengers. They the big thing about their big bodies is that that gives them huge stores of energy. They’re basically fat, and they’re filling up those energy supplies so that they don’t have to feed again for months. And that is what the deep sea is all about. It’s about surviving in conditions that are super challenging, and there isn’t a lot of food, there’s no light, there is a lot of pressure of all that water crossing down. But Life finds a way, and if it means scavenging on an alligator that some scientists have left for you, then, you know, that’s great. It wasn’t the only alligator we took down. There was another one. We left it for longer. We went back after a few weeks, and it was completely gone. Something had chewed through the rope, and we will never know exactly what did take that alligator away, but in my mind, I think it was a giant squid, and it could have been biting through that rope, deciding that this was really the jackpot food that they had found in this big, long alligator, and they had grappled it and taken it off into the dark to go and feed. That’s what I think. I think that’s what happened.

Hannah Stitfall  4:02  

Welcome to a brand new series of oceans life underwater, a series about our watery world and some fascinating species that live below the waves. I’m Hannah Stitfall. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster, and I’m bringing you along as I continue to learn more about the waters that dominate our planet.

Throughout this series, we’ll be sharing incredible stories from the blue front lines, where some amazing people are fighting to protect our oceans and the species that call them home.

Speaker 1  4:46  

This is our heritage. Without this ocean, we do not exist.

Speaker 2

My dive buddy just kind of started like whacking me underwater, and then he didn’t know how to tell me that there’s a shark, so he’s trying to scream, shark. And then eventually he just went with singing the jaws theme tune.

Speaker 3

We’ve just discovered recently that sea towers. Actually fluorescent what?

Speaker 4

So there’s always that possibility of something big and exciting, literally just out of arms reach, but we can’t find it yet.

Hannah Stitfall  5:08  

And this series, I’ll be embarking on an unforgettable adventure of my own as I set sail aboard the Arctic Sunrise, one of Greenpeace’s iconic ships. I’ll share the inspiring stories of the dedicated crew on board and join them as they navigate one of their most important campaigns.

Speaker 2  5:29  

This is a bit tricky because there are actually polar bears out there, so they need to, like, have a polar guide with them, and just a certain amount of people allowed to go on land and hopefully won’t be disturbed by a polar bear. Today, my job is doing a projection on a glacier together with my colleague, Lucas.

Hannah Stitfall  5:45  

Hang on. We’ve just, we’ve just got to go back to that, a projection onto a glacier.

Speaker 1  5:50  

What Norway is now planning which starting deep sea mining is so dangerous because they would not know what they want to destroy now.

Speaker 3  5:58  

It’s much more nicer when dolphins are inside, and be like, yeah, right. Like, you are spoiled. And then at this moment, a lot of the huge school of dolphins came and were like, playing in the bow, and they were sparkling. And I started crying. And I tried to not cry because I couldn’t see anymore. I was like, Oh no,

Hannah Stitfall  6:19  

Our voyage will also take us to the remote and breathtaking archipelago of Svalbard, where we’ll hear first hand from those who live there about how their lives are so intrinsically linked to the surrounding wars.

Multiple Speakers  6:32  

The climate change is affecting somewhere like Svalbard, but it’s not been created on Svalbard. I’ve just seen the glacier basically disappear in front of my eyes. Everything living on land is connected to the ocean. The whole cycle is connected to the ocean. You know, polar bears are connected to the ocean directly, because the main prey species is seals. But even the soul blood reindeer or living on land is highly connected to the ocean through the bird colonies. Even in the 30 years since I come here, the amount of reindeer around town, the amount of geese and birds and everything has exploded. The amount of belugas in the fjord, and larger whales and the fjord mouth have all exploded back to, we’re still not back to original numbers in a lot of species, especially the species that live a longer recycling or rebreeding cycle, wars abounding back in numbers, yet the big whales will take much longer, of course, to come back.

Hannah Stitfall  7:26  

This is Oceans: Life Under Water. If you love series one of this podcast, you may have recognized the voice opening this series. It was, of course, friend of the show, Dr Helen Scales. Helen is marine biologist, author and broadcaster who I spoke to last series about some of the incredible octopus species that live in the ocean. This time round, we’re talking about creatures of the deep. So I had to ask her back on.

Hello, Helen, welcome

Dr Helen Scales  8:04  

So nice to be back. Thank you.

Hannah Stitfall  8:06  

It’s lovely to have you back. We loved having you here so much. Last time we were like, we’re doing a second series, we have to get back. Thank you. It’s wonderful. So for anyone who didn’t hear Season One of the show, please, can you just reintroduce yourself quickly in your work, of course.

Dr Helen Scales  8:22  

So I’m a marine biologist. That’s where my heart lies. Is in the ocean, and it has for many years now. I’ve gone through various guises of being a researcher and a conservationist, and now most of the time I spend writing and finding stories about the ocean and helping people to connect with this extraordinary place that we all love so much. So, yeah, that’s me.

Hannah Stitfall  8:44  

So Helen, today we’re talking all about the strangest creatures in the deep ocean. For our listeners, let’s imagine we’re descending 4000 meters into the deep ocean. What sounds would we hear?

Dr Helen Scales  8:59  

The sound is an interesting one. Because actually, we might not really know, because the main way we get to go into the deep ocean, really is with machines, deep diving submersibles. You know, us human beings are not too well adapted to being in the deep and so and those machines are pretty noisy. So actually, I think if we did switch everything off, it would just be very quiet. I remember recently, I spoke to a veteran, a deep sea biologist, this incredible guy spent his entire career. He’s in his 80s now, and he said, like, one of the two of the things he’d really want to know about the deep is what it sounds like and what it smells like, and those are things we really don’t know at this point. I’m sure there are lots of noises, because there’s so much life down there, but it’s kind of harder to know in that sort of, if we were visiting it ourselves, we can lower down hydrophones. That’s another way of doing it. And I’m sure there’ll be all sorts of noises Those creatures are making, the snapping, the popping, the movements that they’re making down there. But I’ve never actually experienced that, as I say, because it’s always a bit noisy. This tech kind of gets in a way.

Hannah Stitfall  9:54  

So what do you think? Do you think we’d be able to feel anything down there? Would it be cold? Cold. What would the pressure be like? You know? What movement Do you think we could feel?

Dr Helen Scales  10:04  

Yeah, so we definitely know that descending into the deep we would be very cold. I mean, it’s gonna, the temperature’s gonna drop off quite quickly as We’re descending down and then kind of leveling off at just a couple of degrees. It’s just a big cold space. Mostly, we’ll come to that, but mostly it’s really cold down there and quite still. Actually, a lot of the deep is a very kind of still, gentle place. It’s not ROARING CURRENTS ripping around like they are up at the surface. There’s obviously no waves. So it’s quite just a cold, quiet, still place. I would say that’s the sense I would get of being there. You know, if we could climb out of the submersible and just be there. If we could make what wave that magic wand, I think we would experience just the cold and, of course, the pressure, masses of pressure. I mean, that’s just building up and up and up as you’re going deeper. By the time we’re getting to around 4000 meters, it’s, you know, it’s the equivalent of, oh, I don’t know, an elephant stepping on every square inch of your body. Just unbelievable amounts of pressure that we, we we humans, would obviously not be able to resist, and that’s, you know, one reason why we do tend to stay very much inside our submersibles or send robots in our place, that pressure is crushing and, yeah, it’s dark, it’s cold, it’s it’s not a nice place in that sense, for for life to exist, and that is why, for so long, you know, not till not so long ago, maybe a century or so ago. You know, the prevailing wisdom amongst scientists was there isn’t anything down there alive. How could it? Right? It’s so different from anything we experience on land. How can anything exist in that cold and darkened pressure? But of course, it does.

Hannah Stitfall  11:39  

What’s the deepest that you’ve ever been?

Dr Helen Scales  11:43  

Oh, nowhere near that deep, nowhere near that deep. I’ve not actually ever been into the deep sea myself. I’ve only been on expeditions, which is what a lot of people do using remote robots. Basically, you send them down in your place, and you stay on the boat, watching, in real time the video being beamed up through this massive, long, great, big cables. I mean, these machines are like the size of a small car, and you’re putting them in the ocean, and that’s how they’re becoming your eyes and your hands, if you like, as well. In the deep, they’ve got robotic arms. It’s all been controlled by these super skilled pilots, we call them up on the ship, who are just brilliant with remote controls. They use, like gaming controls, to control these things, and we’re watching what’s happening, telling them what to do, where to go. So that’s my kind of deepest experience of the deep. So I’ve stood on a boat, and then, you know, 2000 meters beneath my feet is what we’re looking at. And that’s a weird experience, because you’re in that you very much. Imagine you’re in that space, but you’re, you know, you’re slightly removed from it. But me, in person, I’ve been to 40 meters scuba diving. That’s it. I’ve swum down to 20 meters, holding my breath doing free diving, but that’s about it.

Hannah Stitfall  12:47  

So now we did touch a bit on this in the last series, but we want to talk about the bioluminescence that you find down in the depths. And most people might be familiar with the angler fish, and they have the dangling light hanging from them, and they use that as a law, don’t they, for their prey. What else can we find down there that glows?

Dr Helen Scales  13:07  

Oh, like nearly everything. To be honest, it’s like bioluminescence glowing in the dark. It’s almost compulsory, especially in the open waters, like if you don’t, then you’re really, you know, you’re not part of the gang, no. But Susie, I mean, scientists have done, we’ve got this amazing data set that’s been that’s been collected by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute MBARI, which is in California. And they, for decades, have been taking these robots down and just filming the deep just like putting them down day long dives and just seeing what’s there. And out of these, these archives, they’ve they’ve been able to just pull out amazing information. And one of the things they’ve looked at is, well, how much do things glow? And they’ve got something like, it’s like three quarters of the species they see in the open waters are bioluminescent. So, yeah, squid, fish, crustaceans, jellyfish, glowing. Jellyfish like that. Again, is one of the things that’s really common is to see various creatures that we look at and go, that’s a jellyfish. It could be that they are actually slightly different groups of animals, things like comb jellies, which are not they’re distantly related siphonophores. And the one you a siphonophore, you might be familiar with is the Portuguese man of war up at the surface, but there’s loads of weird looking deep sea siphonophores. But basically they’re creatures that build their bodies out of jelly, and they glow in lots of ways, and they use that ability to bioluminesce for all sorts of things, whether it’s to find food, whether it’s to scale off predators. You know, there are lots of animals that will throw bioluminescent sparkles into the water just to shock a predator. One of my favorites is a thing called the gossamer worms, and they are distant relatives of earthworms, and worms we might see kind of in the sand on the beach, so polygates, things like ragworms, that kind of thing. But these ones swim. They’ve, kind of, they’ve evolved to come off the seabed again, because the deep ocean is so big, it’s that massive open space that’s available for animals to occupy. And they have, and they’ve evolved all these out. Adaptations to be in that massive three dimensional space, the biggest living space on the planet. And worms swim around, and they looked so beautiful. They like these glistening crystal colored they look like they’re made out of just molten glass. And they swim and pirouette through the water forwards and backwards. Wow. You know, their bodies are sort of long and thin. Imagine, like a caterpillar, really, but more beautiful and more agile. They spin in pirouettes, forwards, backwards, and yeah, and if they get scared, they will throw golden, just light particles, into the water and then swim off into the dark and escape while the predator, presumably, is like, what’s going on and what is this? Because it’s all about just getting away from the thing that’s trying to eat you, and the best way to do that is to go and hide a bit further away, where you can’t see in the day, and throw some sparkles just clearly, like just confuse and when. So, I mean, imagine if you lived in a world that was permanently dark with no sunlight, just how useful it would be to be able to make and control your own light. And that’s obviously why it’s evolved time and time again in all these different groups of animals, bioluminescence is like the key thing that’s useful to survive in this really difficult place of the deep sea. You can talk to your friends, you can confuse a predator, you can lure in food. There’s so much you can do, and they do all these creatures do these amazing things with all sorts of different colored lights. It’s amazing.

Hannah Stitfall  16:19  

What are some of the most creative ways in which animals use bioluminescence to survive, right?

Dr Helen Scales  16:25  

So glowing in the dark is this really common trait for things living, especially in the water column. And there’s loads of things they do, not just the luring thing that the Anglerfish and others do. One of my favorites is a thing called counter illumination. So basically, a lot of different animals. There are fish that do this, like the cutest sharks, I think, the velvet belly lantern sharks. They’re these little sharks that would sit in the palm of your hand, one of the smallest species. They basically make their bellies glow blue. And what they’re doing is that they are matching that blue light to the dim blue light that’s coming down above them. So they’re generally in the twilight zone, where there’s that Inky, Inky, dark blue light. But the problem is, if you’re a fish swimming around in that, you’re creating a dark shadow, and other animals can see you and you don’t. You want to be hiding, basically, because there’s nothing to hide behind in the deep open water. You’ve got to try and hide from predators or from prey that you’re, you know, wanting to swim after, and so by matching that light, they’re hiding their silhouette. It’s like a cloak of invisibility that they have, and it means that they are much harder to see, and they can slink around in the in these open, deep waters without being seen. So that’s pretty amazing. And there are other animals. There are jellyfish that use light, not just to startle predators, but to like a burglar alarm. Basically, there’s a beautiful jellyfish called the atollah. It’s one of the red jellyfish. And they’re kind of dinner plate sized, and when they bioluminesce, blue, again, Blue’s a very common color for bioluminescence. It kind of spins around like a kind of, I don’t know, like spirals of light. And what we think that’s happening, what’s happening there is they’re actually trying to catch the attention of bigger predators. What we think how this has evolved is that those jellyfish say perhaps they’re being attacked by a, say, a fish of some sort, maybe an angler fish, but those lights are going to attract something really big, like a giant squid. And we’ve had studies have shown that those some scientists have made like an artificial version of this jellyfish, like a thing that glows in the same way, like a robo jellyfish, they’ve put that down, they put a camera on it in the deep sea, and Giants could have come to check it out. So it works. It’s a good way of attracting a deep sea squid. And the idea for the jelly is like they want, basically, they don’t want the squid to eat them. They’re more likely to eat the thing that’s eating them. So it’s like attracting a bigger predator to eat the thing that’s attacking you, what so you can escape? And that’s what we think they’re doing with this kind of burglar alarm light system.

Hannah Stitfall  18:47  

Or how now, talking of attracting big things to scare a big thing off, let’s talk about the giants of the deep I mean, we know there are huge creatures that live down there. Do you think there are giants that we haven’t yet discovered.

Dr Helen Scales  19:02  

I think we have to keep that as a possibility in our minds, just because the deep is so big, we have only just started looking properly with the tech, we now have to look in the deep sea. There’s still so much we haven’t looked at, and there’s so much opportunity for things to hide that, yeah, sure, there could be great, big things we haven’t found. I’m not a big believer in things like Megalodon. I don’t think they’re living in deep sea trenches. I mean, you ask most shark experts worth their salt, and I think they’ll tell you that that’s that’s pretty unlikely they know, but we do. We are finding things like, you know, species of deep diving whales that haven’t really been seen very often. They are found because, again, they’re very mysterious. They spend a lot of their time in very deep water, hunting and very only very briefly come to the surface. And they’re fast moving. You know, they’re not the kind of thing that they’ll they’ll avoid a camera and a robot that’s big and noisy down in the deep sea. You can easily see how they like not going over there, so you wouldn’t see them. So if. For me, I think the big exciting idea about the deep sea is that we are always just kind of looking at this little these little snapshots in a small space and small time. When we send down machines and we use the tech we have, there’s always going to be something just beyond the reach of your lights or the sensors or whatever it is you’re using. There’s always going to be something that we didn’t see. So there’s always that possibility of something big and exciting, literally, just out of arms reach, but we can’t find it yet.

Hannah Stitfall  20:29  

But no Megalodon.

Dr Helen Scales  20:31  

No Megalodon, sorry. Sorry about that. I know. I mean, they definitely did exist, but just not for a few million years.

Hannah Stitfall  20:36  

So what is the biggest creature that we know of down there. I mean, you spoke a bit about the whales, there.

Dr Helen Scales  20:44  

I think actually it probably is whales, if we count that as a deep sea creature, I think we can, just because they come to the surface to breathe, they spend most of their time in the deep. You know, a sperm whale really lives and hunts in the deep for so much time. I think it counts as a deep sea creature to be honest. Otherwise, yeah. I mean, there are other less mobile, big things in the deep, and a lot of things are bigger than than they would be elsewhere. So we’ve had the giant isopods. They’re way bigger than they are in other parts. We’ve got things like giant sea spiders. They’re not the biggest. You know, there are bigger things than giant sea spiders in the deep, but they’re bigger than all the other sea spiders, which are teeny, tiny things, and these aren’t spiders, by the way, so don’t worry if you are arachnophobic and you’re listening. They’re a completely different group of animals. They do look like spiders, but they’re not.

Hannah Stitfall  21:27  

So hang on. How big are they see spiders?

Dr Helen Scales  21:33  

So the deep, okay, you’re putting your arms out that fine. Bring it in. Bring it in. It’s more like kind of dinner plate size, but still pretty amazing for a creature that elsewhere in the ocean is really just like you would miss it. They’re so little and tiny, like tiny, little scraps. So there is something about the deep. Those ones, those sea spiders, live in Antarctica. In the deep, there’s something about the deep that makes things big. We call it deep sea gigantism and and I think again, it links to this idea of there’s not being much food around. And being a being, having a big body means you can have lots of reserves of energy, and you can survive when it’s not much food around. So you we do get things that are bigger in the deep than they would be elsewhere, and then just kind of cool, big things, like deep sea sponges. Couple of years ago, scientists found just a massive sponge the size of a car, four meters by two meters, just a great big deep sea sponge that’s probably incredibly old as well. That’s the other thing about deep sea is that things live for really long time. They live slow lives, and in that time, things that just kind of keep getting bigger and incrementally growing could end up being really big. So you know that sponge has been sat there on the seabed for hundreds of years. Most likely.

Hannah Stitfall  22:42  

So we’ll hear more from Helen later on in this episode, but first, I want to take you far below sea level to the very depths that these creatures inhabit, and to do that, I’ve enlisted the help of Dr Diva Amon. Diva is a marine biologist and science communicator, and she’s about to share the story of her first expedition down to those mysterious steps.

Dr Diva Amon  23:09  

I was between my masters and my PhD, one of my professors, I went to the University of Southampton in the UK, and one of them wrote to me and said, Hey, we’ve got this deep sea cruise that is leaving from Trinidad and Tobago. We have a spot free. Would you like to come? The answer was obviously yes. There are only two to three people that can fit in a submersible, and so when you were going down into the deep sea, usually you were responsible for this whole list of activities and research that your colleagues have given you. Right? It’s not a joy ride. You’re going down there to work. You are, kind of contort yourself into that space because it’s not comfortable at all. Right? Some of them have seats. Some of them you’re just laying on this sort of padded sea floor, kind of like astronauts. And depending on the depth you’re going to you might have to wear warm clothes because they don’t have any kind of heating mechanism. And the deep sea can be like two to three degrees Celsius, right? So you get in the submersibles load off the side. By this point, you’re usually sweating buckets, and then they plop you down into the ocean. Depending on the sea state, it can feel like a washing machine, right? You’re just plopped down, and you’re just at the mercy of the sea while you’re doing all your checks to be able to to descend. Once we get the old clay from the pilots and the ship, we then start to descend. And then it just turns into that time it takes to descend, it turns into like this almost meditative journey. So you’re going down light. The colors of the light are disappearing right different wavelengths, so the colors are changing at the same time light is disappearing, it’s getting darker and darker. And then before you know it, you’re in darkness, and you’re looking out of the tiny porthole or out of the capsule, depending on which submersible you’re in. And then you start to see bioluminescent. As you hit that Twilight Zone, and it is absolutely amazing, like the most incredible firework display you have ever seen in your whole life, but it’s created by animals. And then you continue down. You know you’re free falling, essentially. So things move quickly. You can’t see much. And then you hit the sea floor. You and it’s time to do work. And the moment that the sea floor sort of looms out of the distance at you, because, of course, like it’s very dark, and the only light you have are the submersible lights, right? So you can only see as far as that light will go. And so the moment the sea floor sort of looms out at you. It’s like a bottom inside. And it’s a really special moment, because it’s the first time you’re like, what does it look like down here? Often no one has seen but I must say, like one of my favorite moments of going down into the deep ocean is actually on the journey back up when you start to see faint, sort of light trickling down as you get closer to the surface. And it really does feel like a homecoming, if you will, like you’re going back to, while the deep sea is absolutely incredible, you’re going back to, you’re going back home. And that’s really nice.

Hannah Stitfall  26:20  

We’re gonna take a quick break whilst we readjust to life above the surface, but now is the perfect time to get your phone out your pocket and follow us on Tiktok and Instagram. Go to @oceanspod. We’ll be sharing pictures of some of the underwater wonders we’ve mentioned so far.

This podcast doesn’t just explore our blue planet’s breathtaking beauty, but also exposes the dangers that threatens it to find out more about Greenpeace’s work to protect the oceans and how you can support go to greenpeace.org/oceans.

So Diva, as we’ve just heard, you’ve been on expeditions that take you way, way, way below sea level. I want to know what are some of the most memorable species you’ve seen down there?

Dr Diva Amon  27:30  

I mean, that is such a hard one, because deep sea life is absolutely mad and amazing. There’s so many, right? Whether it is last year we were off Costa Rica doing work, and they had tripod fish. These are fish that stand on their fins have extensions that they use to stand like a tripod. And these sit at nearly two to three feet off the sea floor, like think about how big those fins are, right? Crazy.

Hannah Stitfall  28:01  

Hang on. Hang on, hang on. They’re on these tripods on the bottom of the sea floor?

Dr Diva Amon  28:10  

Yeah. And so literally, their fins are like, tripod legs, yeah, it is mad, and it’s really hard to get a sense of scale. But when you think they’re like two to three feet, their fins are two to three feet off the sea floor, you’re suddenly like, water big. This is not only amazing, but it’s massive, yeah, and they do that so that they because closer to the sea floor, right? That’s why the current is slowest, because of the friction. And so they’re able to project themselves off the sea floor, so that when they’re they’re waiting, and the current is strong, it’s bringing food, essentially to them, that they can then catch, and often they also have like these crazy pectoral fins, one of them, don’t judge me as a marine biologist, that come down, that come over their head, right, and are able to act almost like whiskers to pick up any food. That’s nice. The Deep Sea is not right. Like there are Dumbo Octopus, octopus that have these fins on the side of their head that they used to swim that make them look like Dumbo. And they’re also super, super adorable. There’s one of my favorites, like the Phantom jelly. And this is a deep red jellyfish, Sergio Medusa Giganti is the actual name, and the bell can be two meters, I think, across, right. And then the tentacles can be 10 meters long, but the tentacles literally look like a silk curtain. Again. We saw one off Costa Rica lache, and it just those tentacles just kept going and going and going, and they’re almost like billowing majestically in the current. And it just is amazing. And those are just like a few, right? A few of the hundreds of 1000s of species that live down there that look weird or do weird things. But then there’s also really majestic species which are like corals in the deep sea. You know, there are most of the corals actually occur. In cold waters and the deep ocean, including the deep ocean, not in tropical waters like we might imagine. And in the deep ocean they get to they have incredible longevity, so they are able to live for 1000s of years. Think about that, like one coral being alive for over 4000 years. Think about all that has happened in human history in that time, like it’s perhaps older than the wheel or as old as the wheel, like it’s nuts, right? So deep sea life is amazing. Spend some time just Googling it.

Hannah Stitfall  30:35  

I know how I’m going to be spending my evening.

Dr Diva Amon  30:40  

You will not regret it.

Hannah Stitfall  30:46  

Now, the unfortunate reality for so many of these incredible species is that despite being hundreds of meters below sea level, they are still hugely threatened by human activity. I spoke with Helen about the biggest threats currently facing the deep ocean, including the latest threat of deep sea mining.

What are the biggest threats that the deep sea currently face?

Dr Helen Scales  31:13  

So we might think that because the deep is so far away, you know, we have to go a long way offshore, generally, to get to deep waters, and then it’s so far down that it’s out of the way of human impacts. But sadly, that’s not true, and pretty much any of the things that we’re doing to the shallow seas are also happening in the deep. So climate change does have an effect down there. We are getting warming waters into the deeper parts. And things that are changing in the surface also have their effects in the deep. We’re also seeing plastic pollution down there. I mean that to me, is not a surprise. You know, we’re polluting the ocean. The surface sees so much, of course, a lot of that’s going to end up in the deep. And actually, in some ways concentrating really high concentrations of little particles of plastic are super, super high in parts of the deep, because it’s so gentle, and things just rain down and stay there. But then, as well as all of that, and we’re fishing in the deep as well. You know, increasingly fishing nets are going deeper, trawlers are going deeper, catching things like deep sea sharks, targeting places like deep sea mounts, destroying deep sea corals, which live for hundreds and 1000s of years. That is all happening, but we also have new threats that are on the horizon, and the biggest one of those is deep sea mining. It’s been on the cards for decades. People have dreamt about going down to the deep to exploit rocks that contain valuable metals that lie in the deep sea, and now it’s looking like we’re closer than ever to that becoming a reality. But we also know at the same time a lot more about just how damaging that’s going to be if it is allowed to go ahead to the creatures and species and habitats that we are just starting to learn about, 1000s of species that live nowhere else but in places like these huge areas of abyssal plain. We used to think there was nothing there, like I remember being at school, and people talked to us about manganese nodules, these rocks in the sea bed, and there’s basically nothing but mud and rocks down there, and one day, maybe we’ll mine them. We now know that that’s the basis of incredibly rich ecosystems. There are species living inside those rocks that people want to mine. There are species living on them. There are sponges that grow on them, and then incredible octopuses that the, my favorite, the Casper, the octopus who comes along, and we still haven’t given it a scientific name, so we can call it Casper still. Casper. Still they haven’t been properly identified, but these pale colored octopuses that look so ghostly and they come, they lay their eggs on these sponges that grow on these rocks, and then look after them. The females will guard their eggs. We don’t know how long for, but it could be years, because other deep sea octopuses spend years and years looking after they’re very slow growing eggs. So there’s a really rich ecosystem down there, and we’re just learning about it and knowing how diverse and how special that place is. But at the same time, there are these clamoring demands that we need the metals, and someone wants to make money out of them, so we’re going to do it. Well, we’ll see. We’ll see if that does go ahead, but it is this looming threat that is still not going away.

Hannah Stitfall  34:03  

And what are your hopes for the future of the deep sea ecosystem?

Dr Helen Scales  34:08  

My hopes for the future are that more people will realize that it isn’t this alien space that’s disconnected from us and our lives on land and the surface seas, but really embrace this amazing place as being a part, a vital part of our living planet, and the biggest, you know, most unknown, most mysterious and incredible place, and really feeling that connection. And I think if we have that, if we have more people, not just thinking, Oh, it’s somewhere else that I don’t care about and I’m not thinking about, but really bringing it into our lives, then I think things like deep sea mining become less likely because we know and we care about what’s down there. So I think we’re on that road now. I think we are getting towards this point where more people do feel that the ocean is important, and the deep ocean, particularly is an amazing place. And. That’s a very powerful thing. There’s a lot of very scary things happening in the world at the moment, but I think we have to hold on to the idea that we know how to make a better future for the deep and more people are pushing towards that. So we are going in the right direction.

Hannah Stitfall  35:13  

And how do all of the deep sea creatures fit into the larger puzzle of the ocean’s health and biodiversity?

Dr Helen Scales  35:20  

So again, we’re learning more about that all the time, about all these connections between the surface Sea and the deep sea, and seeing that there is a lot of coming and going. There are a lot of ecological connections, whether it’s species that migrate to the surface at night and then go back down, whether it’s surface species that we might recognize, like tuna and sharks and turtles diving down into the deep to feed these connections are there, you know, whether it’s food and energy and carbon coming up and down through the ecosystem, through the water column. So it absolutely is an essential part of how the whole of the ocean works. And we’re finding crazy things, new discoveries about the deep sea that are blowing people’s minds. Just this year, it was announced that scientists think they found, well, they found evidence that oxygen is being made in the deep sea. No one was expecting that at all, and we don’t yet understand fully what that is. And it could be these rocks that people want to mine that’s creating that oxygen. We desperately need to know more about what is actually going on and why that seems to be happening again. It could be another really critical link between seabed ecosystems and the rest of the open water and up to the surface and everything else we just don’t know at this point. So finding out things like that, it really does shift our views, like suddenly and really dramatically towards what is happening in the deep sea and why it matters for for the whole of the ocean.

Hannah Stitfall  36:38  

And which one deep sea creature best represents the weirdness of the abyss. Only one.

Dr Helen Scales  36:48  

Oh, such a good question. I love it. It could be so many. But I would love to tell you about strawberry squid. Have we talked about strawberry squid before?

Hannah Stitfall  36:57  

I don’t. No, okay, I think we have.

Dr Helen Scales  37:01  

You’re gonna love this. They are fabulous. So actually, I can tell you a story about finding one of these. I was in California, in Monterey Bay, working with some deep sea scientists out there, and we put down a trawl net. We were looking for different kinds of creatures. Actually, we were looking for really tiny things, relatives of shrimp that have amazing eyes, called amphipods. So that’s what we were looking for. We brought this net up, we put it down. So we were just doing a very gentle trawl about 1000 meters down as it comes back on up on deck, after about an hour of sampling, there’s this great big, long net. It looks like a sort of, sort of white tube, and then at the end there’s a canister, and you unclip it, and you pour out the contents. And that’s all the stuff you’ve caught. And out of that, we were expecting to get these little they look like little, tiny, tiny shrimp. That’s what we were going for. But out came this bright red, strawberry red squid, and it propped into our pop and we were all like, oh my god, here’s your Toothless the strawberry squid, otherwise known as the strawberry squid, or the cockeyed squid, which is why they are incredible. So this little squid, it’s about size of my hand, and it swam. It was still alive and in really good condition when we caught it, and it was swimming around our little pot of water. And it has two different eyes. This is why they’re also called the cockeye Squid. One eye is big and yellow and domed, and it sticks out of its body and just looks odd and just different. And the other is like a normal squid kind of eye. It’s blue and sort of normal sized, if you like, on the other side. And the reason they have this is they live in the twilight zone. And this is why I think they’re such a cool species, is because they’ve evolved to basically live in this in between world where up above and down below is very different. And video footage of these things alive in the deep we’ve seen they orientate their body with their head slightly down at an angle, and they put point their yellow eye up towards the surface. And that eye is basically looking for these shadows of animals above their heads. So they’re looking, you know, for prey and for predators that are swimming above them, with that blue light coming above them, sort of just sinking down, that that Inky, blue light I was telling you about. And the yellow color is actually it’s trying to break that counter illumination, because it’s filtering out the light that those animals are making, because there’s a slight difference in the wavelength, a slightly greener color of these, like, like things like the little sharks that are trying to hide with their blue belly lights. And this, this yellow color. It’s like a pair of sunglasses. They put that on, and it helps to kind of break that illumination and block that light out so they can see the shadows of those fish going above. So that’s like, the kind of the eye that’s suited to looking up towards the surface is this, like yellow pair of sunglasses, basically, and then the other eye looks down into the deep. And what that eye is doing is looking for flashes of bioluminescence, and it’s sort of tuned much more towards looking into the deep dark below, just for these very quick flashes of animals flashing blue, mostly blue, lights beneath them. So they’ve kind of they do a bit of both, in this one little squid, which is so cool, and they also glow themselves. So they another reason they’re called strawberry squid it’s not just the color. They do look like. They’re covered in strawberry pips, and those are their photo fours. It’s what glows. And so actually, one thing you can do, and we did do this, if you put a UV, UV light on them, they glow red because that’s just what they happen to have pigments that then interact with the UV light and make a red glowing color. They’re phosphorescent. No, they’re bio fluorescent. But in the deep, they’ll glow blue. And again, we think it could be to startle predators. Maybe they talk to each other. We don’t really know, for strawberry squid, but they are really extraordinary creatures, I think. And they have just, they have figured out how to live in this very challenging in between world of The Twilight Zone. They look up, they look down, they glow. They’re incredible. And the red as well, is also a really common color in the deep sea. That is another weird thing. You go in the deep and a lot of things are red, and that’s because that red, red things just kind of disappear in the dark. There’s no red light to reflect off them. So that squid looked beautiful and ruby red in our up on the deck of the ship, but down where it lives, it lives, it would have just looked kind of brown and indistinct, and again, it would have helped it to hide. So it’s like this perfectly adapted deep sea creature. And super cute. So so cute.

Hannah Stitfall  41:13  

Well, Helen, you are an expert at bringing the wonder to the deep sea creatures. It’s been fascinating, yet again to talk to you today. Thank you for coming back.

Dr Helen Scales  41:23  

Thanks so much for having me pleasure as always.

Hannah Stitfall  41:30  

Thank you. I’m so grateful to Helen for joining us this week. She’s just a fountain of knowledge about the deep sea and everything that lives in it.

So you’ve had a little introduction to deep sea mining this week, but next week, we’ll be looking further into this new threat to marine life with Sandor Mulsow, a marine geologist and activist, plus, I’ll be taking you with me on an adventure across the waves. You don’t want to miss that.

Dr Laura  42:00  

There was this incredible soft light and a moon ball, and I felt this urge to breathe into my mouth, and then I close it, will I be able to capture some of this so that I can bring it back home and show to others.

Hannah Stitfall  42:15  

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It is hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Vicki Reich, Catalina Noguera, Robert Wallace, George Sampson, Kate Stevens, Steve Jones and Christina Irivnak. Sound design is by Crawford Blair. The music we use is from our partners, BMG, Production Music. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Alex Yallop, Jeane Meyer, Marta of charik. Flora Hvesi, Becky Malone and Alice Lloyd Hunter, archive, courtesy of Greenpeace. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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