Deep Sea News Latest Blog Posts

Every ocean scientist should know how to tie a half dozen or so knots. One of those should be a monkey’s fist, name because it looks like a small clenched fist, it was originally tied into the end of a line or rope to add weight. The weighted end could be thrown easily over a [...]

Cnidarian Lifeforms from Delrious on Vimeo. Hat tip to Penguin Wanderings.

The question is not why are whales big but why are whales not bigger? The blue whales reached weights of 150 tons prewhaling. To appreciate how massive a blue whale is, consider it would take 15 school buses, around 10 tons in weight to equal one of these marine mammals. Why are there no 250 ...

A nice 9 minute interview of Bob Ballard on a recent 60 minutes. (click on link if player below does not work) Watch CBS News Videos Online Hat tip to Michael Barton, FCD.

Squidy by ~ced66 on deviantART Hat tip to @sevenbullsboy on Twitter.

Just to be fair to Sea Shepherd, ship launch FAIL’s can happen to anyone. Even megatonne cargo ships! Isn’t she just so chipper! Bonus mega ship launch FAIL compilation below the fold!

Seriously cool footage at the BBC. Also with a nice little accompanying article that you should read. In the sequence filmed for the Life series, the invertebrates gather in a frenzy to feast on a seal carcass that has sunk to the ocean floor. So much food may only arrive in one place once in a ...

Globo is one of the major television networks in Brazil and they are airing this week a special segment on the Darwin and the Adventure expedition aboard the Tocorimé. It is very exciting to see how the production came out. It is all in portuguese except for the English speakers’ ...

Ocean bloggers and readers are amazing! We managed to raise over $4600 for classrooms all around the country, impacted 980 students immediately, but most of these projects had materials that will be used for future classes. Thus, your impact will go much much further. Give yourselves round of ...

Craig is the hipster around here, always keeping up on the latest trends and knows exactly what the kids are doing these days. Me, I more of a laid back folkie. Give me a can of Dale’s Pale Ale, an acoustic guitar and a summer night sky filled with fireflies. Now I know all the [...]

Life Magazine’s website has pictures up from a 1954 photo shoot of the Disney movie adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It is amazing to see how far SCUBA and underwater filming has come in 55 years! 20,000 Leagues is perhaps one of the most formative components ...

Enter the Ady Gil (formerly the Earthrace). No, this isn’t the Knight Rider of the harbor. This batmobile of conservation is now the newest member of the Sea Shepherd team, also known as Team Sink-A-Boat-For-Whales. From Sea Shepherd’s press office: Due to its speed capabilities, up ...

A deep-sea crab walks into a pub and asked, ”Where’s the bar tender?” Few deep-sea organisms rely on food originally from land. Most deep-sea dwellers rely on marine snow (detritus raining from the surface), large food falls like dead whales, or chemosynthetic pathways like ...

Over ten years ago Fred Grassle, a marine biologist with deep-sea tendencies, and Jesse Ausubel, program director for Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, started conversing on an initiative to document the biodiversity of the oceans. That program, the Census of Marine Life, started in 2000 with the goal ...

Kevin and I are big fans of I’m On A Boat and the internets are full of parodies of this parody (Bert and Ernie ver., Office ver., English Channel ver., I’m On A Bus ver., I’m In A Tux ver., Hard Rock ver., and so on). Those are find and dandy, but they pale in [...]

Wood’s Hole’s Nereus was offloaded off the R/V Cape Hatteras today. Stood by to watch it get packed up. It was a tight fit with little room for error! The Nereus is a hybrid AUV/ROV that was just out to Cayman Rise where it was used to help discover new vents in the Caribbean! To ...

Forget the megayacht of yesterday. I am sure I can afford a megayacht timeshare…unless you can rent by the minute and I start saving now. Despite my lack of cash, I do have access to some willow rods. If I could just find the a large animal hide, I’d be set. I guess it’s ...

In 2008 we reported on the 7700 meter record for filming fish, video above, Using a remote lander, a group filmed Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis, a deep-water snailfish, found only in the Northwest Pacific between 6.1km to 7.5km deep. Now this same group filmed swarms of the snailfish ...

BBC videographers caught a giant stingray on film for the first time. The smalleye, shown in the video, is the largest of all stingrays reaching wing widths of 2m.

Epibulus insidiator, the slingjaw wrass, “possesses the most extreme jaw protrusion ever measured in fishes.” Individuals can protrude their jaw up to half the body length to capture carbs, shrimps, and small fishes. This occurs through multiple structural novelties, as the video ...