Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to
Speaker 3: Blow Your Mind, we're going to be starting a discussion
Speaker 3: about animal life in the deepest parts of the ocean,
Speaker 3: specifically the deep ocean's predators, looking at what it takes
Speaker 3: to be an active hunter in the deep. And I
Speaker 3: thought a good place to start off with this series
Speaker 3: would be the story that inspired me to look at
Speaker 3: this topic, and that was the discovery last year of
Speaker 3: a new species known as Delsabella common chaka. You may
Speaker 3: have seen stories about this. It was covered in some
Speaker 3: popular press, but the finding was described in a November
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four paper published in the journal Systematics and
Speaker 3: Biodiversity by Johanna Weston, Carolina Gonzales, Reuben Escribano, and Osvaldo Uloa,
Speaker 3: and the paper was called a new large predator Amphibida
Speaker 3: useyrite hidden at Haitl depths of the Atacama Trench. Now,
Speaker 3: one of the things that really got my attention when
Speaker 3: I was first reading about this was simply what this
Speaker 3: animal looks like. We'll get to a physical description of
Speaker 3: it in just a minute. But the other thing that
Speaker 3: I thought was really interesting is the ecological question how
Speaker 3: an animal like this makes its living in such an environment,
Speaker 3: what it takes to be a predator so far down
Speaker 3: in the ocean. And we'll be continuing to explore that
Speaker 3: question as we as we move on in the series.
Speaker 3: So the authors of this paper included scientists affiliated with
Speaker 3: the Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in the United States and the
Speaker 3: Instituto millenniody Oceanographia, which is based at the Universidad des
Speaker 3: Concepcion in Chile. Now, again, this paper was marking the
Speaker 3: discovery of a new species of oceanic predator, and the
Speaker 3: name they gave to the new predator was del Sibella Kemanchaka.
Speaker 3: And this is interesting for a number of reasons. I'll
Speaker 3: do a full etymology in just a minute here, but
Speaker 3: especially I wanted to draw attention to the species name Kemanchaka,
Speaker 3: which I saw in several sources was derived from an
Speaker 3: Andean language word, a word apparently in several of the
Speaker 3: Indian languages meaning darkness, but apparently it has multiple meanings.
Speaker 3: So kemanchaka also refers, according to the authors of this paper,
Speaker 3: to quote a dense, low coastal fog that forms by
Speaker 3: the Atacama Desert and moves inland. Kamanchakas was also the
Speaker 3: name given to some of the littoral inhabitants of this
Speaker 3: desertic region, so mysterious swirling ideas. There a name that
Speaker 3: means fog, a kind of fog that rolls in, rolls
Speaker 3: in around the desert. And then also darkness itself. Now
Speaker 3: why would the species be named darkness, Well, it's because
Speaker 3: Dulcibella kim and Chaka was discovered at a depth of
Speaker 3: almost eight thousand meters in a place called the Atacama Trench.
Speaker 3: This is a deep ocean trench basically following the contour
Speaker 3: off the coast of South America from perud Icile and
Speaker 3: it's roughly one hundred and sixty kilometers or about one
Speaker 3: hundred miles off shore for most of its length. And
Speaker 3: as we will probably continue to come back to in
Speaker 3: this series, there are a lot of interesting things about
Speaker 3: this sort of environment. Deep ocean trenches, sometimes called the
Speaker 3: Hadle zone, can function kind of like islands do in biogeography.
Speaker 3: They create a pocket of environmental conditions surrounded on all
Speaker 3: sides by much different conditions where the ocean is less
Speaker 3: deep all around them. Unless the pressure is different, the
Speaker 3: temperature is different. And thus in these in these deep
Speaker 3: deep zones surrounded by the less deep deep zones, they
Speaker 3: can evolve unique isolated organisms and biological relationships. So ocean
Speaker 3: trenches are in many ways like islands inverted, but with
Speaker 3: unique features. For example, the kind of ecosystem that's possible
Speaker 3: in a deep ocean trench is based in part on
Speaker 3: what happens in the ocean above it, like what kind
Speaker 3: of biological productivity takes place up there, and by consequence,
Speaker 3: what kind and quantities of goodies rain down into the
Speaker 3: trench from above. I was thinking about it, and you
Speaker 3: could almost kind of compare that environmental factor to something
Speaker 3: like soil quality or water conditions on a terrestrial island environment.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, often refer to does the marine snow? I
Speaker 2: think of it as kind of like the gray rainfall
Speaker 2: of little pieces of flesh.
Speaker 3: The blessed rot that sustains us all. And in addition
Speaker 3: to these interesting general qualities that the Autocoma Trench itself
Speaker 3: is especially interesting and unique because of its relative isolation
Speaker 3: from other deep ocean trenches. So to read from the
Speaker 3: paper here, the authors say, quote the Hatel zone, or
Speaker 3: the deepest forty five percent of the ocean from six
Speaker 3: thousand to eleven thousand meters, has high levels of undiscovered biodiversity.
Speaker 3: Most Hatel features are trenches formed at the subduction zone
Speaker 3: between tectonic plates and shaped by a unique suite of
Speaker 3: extrinsic and intrinsic factors. The Autocoma Trench, the southern sector
Speaker 3: of the Peru Chile Trench, is one of the most
Speaker 3: geographically isolated Hatel features and is situated below eutrophic surface
Speaker 3: waters and cara rised by high sediment loads. The Atakoma
Speaker 3: Trench is known to host a highly distinctive faunel community
Speaker 3: driven by a combination of these isolating factors. So it's
Speaker 3: not just the things that are true of these these
Speaker 3: deep trench environments, the Hatel zones around the world, but
Speaker 3: also that there's something kind of special about this one,
Speaker 3: that it's especially isolated, that it's got these productive waters
Speaker 3: above it, and so it gives rise to a lot
Speaker 3: of unique and fascinating biology.
Speaker 2: Kind of a Galapagos of the deep, perhaps to play
Speaker 2: with that island comparison.
Speaker 3: Now, just a side note here because it connected to
Speaker 3: something we've talked about before. The authors give a nod
Speaker 3: to important early work done in characterizing hadel fauna in
Speaker 3: the nineteen sixties by expeditions of the First of all,
Speaker 3: they mentioned the RV academic Corchetov, but then they also
Speaker 3: mentioned the r V el Tanan. Yeah, we talked about
Speaker 3: some deep otion surveys by the Eltannan in a series
Speaker 3: we did about sort of anomalous imagery taken underwater that
Speaker 3: people ended up saying had to be UFOs or some
Speaker 3: kind of technology from the future or Atlantis or anything
Speaker 3: like that. In this case, the thing was the el
Speaker 3: tannin quote antenna. Many people have said, oh, yeah, this
Speaker 3: has to be a piece of alien technology because it
Speaker 3: looks like a radar array with these aerials coming up.
Speaker 3: In fact, it is almost definitely a carnivorous sponge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, deep sea carnivorous sponge. Yeah. So that's a fun
Speaker 2: episode to go back and listen to if you want
Speaker 2: to lean more into this weird world of misinterpretation of
Speaker 2: confusing visual data.
Speaker 3: So coming back to this newly discovered species, the new
Speaker 3: species is an amphipod now amphipods are animals belonging to
Speaker 3: the order Amphipida, which are crustaceans found in both marine
Speaker 3: and freshwater environments, usually described as having laterally compressed bodies,
Speaker 3: so you can think of them as taller than they
Speaker 3: are wide, maybe like somebody put them in a vice
Speaker 3: and squeeze their sides in. I've seen a number of
Speaker 3: sources describe amphipods as looking shrimp like, and that does
Speaker 3: describe some of them. Confusingly, shrimp are not amphipods, but
Speaker 3: a lot of apipods do look shrimp like, though not
Speaker 3: all of them. Some of them look more like weird
Speaker 3: fantasy insects. For example, just one I found that I
Speaker 3: thought was very visually striking. If you want a good
Speaker 3: little freak out, look up the amphipod genus Epimeria epi
Speaker 3: me r Ia with a few of the guys in
Speaker 3: this genus. I get strong notes of the toxic jungle
Speaker 3: from NAUSICAA.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and this one image that you shared in our
Speaker 2: outline here, in particular, I found extra grotesque because if
Speaker 2: I didn't know better, I would dismiss this image as
Speaker 2: that sort of horrifying AI generated monster imagery that you
Speaker 2: see where are these days? You know, the sort of
Speaker 2: thing that is in and of itself unnerving and disturbing.
Speaker 2: But I've also swiftly conditioned myself to abhor them all
Speaker 2: the more because I know they're not the product of
Speaker 2: a human mind or a human imagination. So just looking
Speaker 2: at this image makes my stomach churn in weird ways,
Speaker 2: and I end up not really knowing how I feel
Speaker 2: about it. But of course this is not an AI
Speaker 2: generated monstrosity. This isn't an actual denizen of the natural world.
Speaker 3: I wonder if everybody has the same experience I do,
Speaker 3: so I don't. Of course, I don't personally use Facebook
Speaker 3: these days, but I still have an account specifically to
Speaker 3: check our work, you know, our work page every now
Speaker 3: and then, and every time I log in there, literally
Speaker 3: my entire news feed on there is just like AI
Speaker 3: generated fake images of things and saying like new beasts
Speaker 3: discovered in whatever, And you know, it's almost like they're
Speaker 3: like they're trying to trick us into doing an episode
Speaker 3: on this new beast discovered as so AI garbage. That's
Speaker 3: like a fake image of some monster in a jungle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't like it.
Speaker 3: I mean, in a way. I appreciate it because it's
Speaker 3: so distasteful. I'm not even tempted to scroll the news
Speaker 3: feed for a few seconds. I just immediately navigate away.
Speaker 2: But yeah, there's currently a sameness to so much of it,
Speaker 2: and I guess I should appreciate that sameness. Swile it's
Speaker 2: still there. If it gets harder to tell them, even
Speaker 2: harder to classify them and categorize them as AI generated things,
Speaker 2: then we're even We're in even more troubling waters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but back to real troubling waters, right.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: Amphipods can be found in all over the place, many habitats.
Speaker 3: They take many different forms. It seems the majority of
Speaker 3: amphipods are scavengers. They eat decomposing organisms or whatever little
Speaker 3: bits of organic detritis they come across. The new species
Speaker 3: described in this paper, however, is an active predator. According
Speaker 3: to the authors, it is the first large active predator
Speaker 3: ever found this deep in the Atacoma Trench. Again, it
Speaker 3: was the individuals collected here. We're at like seventy nine
Speaker 3: hundred meters down. All the other amphipods previously identified in
Speaker 3: this area have been scavengers. Though predatory amphipods have been
Speaker 3: found in other ocean trenches on Earth. So the specimens
Speaker 3: here were collected by a deep sea vehicle operated by
Speaker 3: Chile's Integrated Deep Ocean Observing System in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: there was like a they call it like a lander vehicle.
Speaker 3: So it's like a thing that can go down and
Speaker 3: collect collect specimens, collect baited traps and things like that.
Speaker 3: And according to morphological and genetic analysis, this new predator
Speaker 3: is not only a newly discovered species, but a newly
Speaker 3: discovered genus. And here's where I wanted to get back
Speaker 3: to both the etymology of the genus and species name,
Speaker 3: but to a kind of interesting side note on taxonomic frustration.
Speaker 3: So the authors originally tried to give this animal the
Speaker 3: genus name Dulcinea, which is spelled d u l c
Speaker 3: i n e A Dulcinea, after the name of a
Speaker 3: character from don Quixote.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, Robert Doolay would have loved this, this choice
Speaker 2: in genus name because the lyrics to don Quixote the
Speaker 2: man a Lamacha musical. Rather, it goes like, you know, Dulcinea, dulcinea,
Speaker 2: I see heaven when I see the Dulcinea.
Speaker 3: Okay, I don't know that one. It's a great musical, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'll look it up. I've heard of it before, obviously,
Speaker 3: but yeah, never, I've never seen it or listen. But
Speaker 3: this this apparently, and so like trying to name this
Speaker 3: genus after don Quixote was apparently following a pre existing
Speaker 3: convention by which several other genera of deep sea amphipods
Speaker 3: were named after characters from Servantes. So I've never read
Speaker 3: don Quixote myself, so I didn't know who this character was,
Speaker 3: and I was curious to look it up. The character
Speaker 3: is called Dulcinea del Toboso and is a character that
Speaker 3: is fictional or maybe better to say, imaginary, within the
Speaker 3: narrative of the novel. So, the character don Quixote is,
Speaker 3: you know, like a knight errant, and he thinks he
Speaker 3: must have a lady to serve. So the way I
Speaker 3: read it summarized is that he looks at a peasant
Speaker 3: girl and then he kind of imagines a version of
Speaker 3: her as this high born princess who is impossibly perfect
Speaker 3: and worthy of his lance in every way, and so
Speaker 3: he thinks of her as the ultimate all time milady.
Speaker 3: And this character in his head he names Dulcinea del toboso.
Speaker 3: Dulcinea derived from like dulce, the Latin word for sweet,
Speaker 3: So this name would mean a superlative sweetness. And so,
Speaker 3: together with what I already mentioned about the species name
Speaker 3: cumunchaka meaning darkness, darkness in several indigenous and in languages,
Speaker 3: this predatory amphipod's name basically means sweet darkness. It's like
Speaker 3: the name of a necromancer's pet. And so this is
Speaker 3: just even the name Dulcinea darkness. That sounds pretty great.
Speaker 3: That's got some great noir vibes to it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like that saccharin goth thing. There's a lot of that,
Speaker 3: a lot of that going on. And so this is
Speaker 3: still basically what the animal is named. But remember I
Speaker 3: was gonna mention taxonomic frustrations. So they were trying to
Speaker 3: name the genus Dulcinea, but it turned out that name
Speaker 3: had already been assigned to a genus of Coleoptera, I
Speaker 3: mean beatles, a genus of beetles a long time ago,
Speaker 3: I think over one hundred years ago. I don't even
Speaker 3: know if that genus name is even used anymore, but
Speaker 3: it had been assigned sometime in the past, and according
Speaker 3: to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, you cannot reuse names,
Speaker 3: so they had to change the name. They changed it
Speaker 3: to Dulcibella, also a nickname derived from the word for
Speaker 3: sweet or weakness, also basically meaning milady. And so now
Speaker 3: we end up with dulcibella common chaka. Still, I think
Speaker 3: you can still say sweet darkness.
Speaker 2: By the way, some of you might have noticed that
Speaker 2: I said dulcinea earlier and not dulcinea. In the musical,
Speaker 2: they say dulcinea, so I believe dulcinea is correct. So
Speaker 2: I don't know. This is not a show that is
Speaker 2: exclusively about musicals, though, so those are you more familiar
Speaker 2: with Mana la mancha, perhaps you can write it about it.
Speaker 3: I think we also are bound to be forgiving of
Speaker 3: pronunciation differences.
Speaker 2: I think Peter O'Toole sings it dulcinea in the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two adaptation of the musical. But we're not talking
Speaker 2: about Peter o'tool We're talking about the deep ocean.
Speaker 3: Right, So I think it's finally time to talk about
Speaker 3: the physical form of this creature. So Rob, I've attached
Speaker 3: a photo for you to look at in the outline here. Again,
Speaker 3: folks at home, if you want to look it up yourselves,
Speaker 3: you can google Dulcabella kamon Chaka. The first thing I
Speaker 3: have to acknowledge is what many other articles have already
Speaker 3: pointed out. There is some significant overlap with the appearance
Speaker 3: of the face hugger from Alien. Not so much in
Speaker 3: body form, it's not shaped like a face hugger, but
Speaker 3: in color and texture. I think we're almost perfectly there.
Speaker 3: The pale white and off white, slimy, bumpy surface in
Speaker 3: some places looks kind of like a shrimp covered in
Speaker 3: white goo. In other places looks like a translucent white
Speaker 3: skin stretched over a bumpy landscape of I got some
Speaker 3: things in there that look like vertebrae, little leg joints
Speaker 3: and knobs that were just made to wriggle and writhe.
Speaker 3: It is monstrously face huggery in multiple ways, not in
Speaker 3: body shape, but otherwise. Yes.
Speaker 2: The texture, the apparent texture here reminds me of various
Speaker 2: images I've seen of like three D printed scaffolding for
Speaker 2: like vatgrown organs, and like you know, it has that
Speaker 2: kind of appear. It's kind of like if you three
Speaker 2: D printed a shrimp and you really didn't want to
Speaker 2: eat it. It also kind of has a zoidberg ye
Speaker 2: look to it, with its various mouth parts. It looks
Speaker 2: almost like it has like cuthulhuoid tentacles or something, So
Speaker 2: it has a real kind of sinister vibe.
Speaker 3: I have to say. Now, there's another thing that is
Speaker 3: both creepy and funny about it, which is not so
Speaker 3: much about the organism itself, but about how I misunderstood
Speaker 3: it when I was first looking at this picture. Because
Speaker 3: one way I would have initially described this is it's
Speaker 3: like a cavefish xenomor of shrimp dog with a broom
Speaker 3: for a face. Because there is what I first interpreted
Speaker 3: to be like a huge, long, bristly white beard shooting
Speaker 3: straight out of the animal's head. But here's the thing
Speaker 3: on the right side of the image. There, rob that
Speaker 3: is not the animal's head. I was looking at it backwards.
Speaker 3: The head is on the left. So an expert, you know,
Speaker 3: somebody who knows amphipod biology, probably would not have made
Speaker 3: this mistake. But just to add to the list of
Speaker 3: weird things about it for the lay observer, the backside
Speaker 3: doubles as a kind of ghostly veiled face and again
Speaker 3: a little, you said, Cathu Lewy. I can see that
Speaker 3: because the way you know, mind flavors are rendered with
Speaker 3: like all the tentacles coming out of the face. When
Speaker 3: you look at its backside as its head, which really
Speaker 3: I think many observers would be strongly inclined to do,
Speaker 3: it's got all this stuff coming out of the front
Speaker 3: and that that's actually the back.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's even weirder when you look at it the
Speaker 2: right way around because its head is up here, not
Speaker 2: down there. Wow.
Speaker 3: So this specimen we're looking at here is a little
Speaker 3: less than four centimeters long. And remember this does qualify
Speaker 3: as a large predator for its environment. There was a
Speaker 3: part of the paper I want to read where the
Speaker 3: authors describe its characteristic body features, because it ends up
Speaker 3: that it's like this list of weird anatomical terms that
Speaker 3: flow together like a kind of horrible poetry. So they
Speaker 3: describe it as follows, a smooth dorsal body, twelve spines
Speaker 3: on the outer maxilla, one plate, subsimilar and strongly subcelate
Speaker 3: nathopods with broad carpus lobes. The periopods three and four
Speaker 3: Dactyli are zero point forty five x of the respective
Speaker 3: propodus and periopods five to seven dactili are zero point
Speaker 3: six x, a distal spiniform process on the peduncle of
Speaker 3: Europod one and an elongated but weakly cleft telson and
Speaker 3: that al It's like, I don't know, sexy or something.
Speaker 2: It is sexy or something. Yes, the peduncle of europod one.
Speaker 3: I love it, but again you might not guess by
Speaker 3: looking at it. One of the things that distinguishes this
Speaker 3: is that for its environment, this is a fast moving animal,
Speaker 3: a fast moving predator of the deep ocean, not an
Speaker 3: ambling seafloor scrubber, but an active predator that chases down prey.
Speaker 3: Typically it's prey being other amphipods. You might remember from
Speaker 3: the poetry passage the nathopods that spelled g n A
Speaker 3: t h opods. These are raptorial front appendages that the
Speaker 3: animals used to hunt. So they'll dart through the water
Speaker 3: and snatch the smaller cousins with these fore claws that
Speaker 3: looks you can kind of imagine like the clause of
Speaker 3: a praying mantis. You know, these folding fore claws that
Speaker 3: can grab and then feed prey toward the mouth.
Speaker 2: Strong elements of JABBERWOCKI I want to say to all
Speaker 2: of the language involved in this description, Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: feel like the nathopods surely Outgrabe at one point or another.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, I just had to look up the poem.
Speaker 3: I couldn't remember the exact phrasing, but I see this
Speaker 3: and I see sly the toes. But anyway, I just
Speaker 3: thought this was so interesting looking at animals like this
Speaker 3: and that we're still discovering these types of these animals,
Speaker 3: these predators, because it reminds us how relatively little we
Speaker 3: know about these extremely deep environments, especially super deep like
Speaker 3: the Hadel Zone the deep ocean trenches. And one thing
Speaker 3: that some authors writing about this discovery mentioned is that
Speaker 3: there's actually a lot that studying the fauna of the
Speaker 3: Hadel Zone could teach us about how to look for
Speaker 3: life elsewhere in the Solar System, like on subsurface oceans,
Speaker 3: on moons like Europa.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, the idea of looking into dark, lightless oceans.
Speaker 2: We have dark, lightless regions of our own ocean. And indeed,
Speaker 2: one thing that becomes clear when you start reading more
Speaker 2: about specific organisms is that we know more than we
Speaker 2: ever have regarding these depths but there is still so
Speaker 2: much mystery, and you know, it's just there are these
Speaker 2: are places that are hard to get to, hard to
Speaker 2: get eyes down there, you know, be they organic or mechanical.
Speaker 2: And we've discussed in the past the complications that are
Speaker 2: involved in bringing any kind of physical specimens up from
Speaker 2: the deep. They may you know, explode and be damaged
Speaker 2: in ways that don't apply as much to other organisms
Speaker 2: you might collect. Many of these are very delicate as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely true. So there are a lot of challenges
Speaker 3: to studying the biology and ecology of the deep ocean,
Speaker 3: but there is a lot of interesting stuff we know,
Speaker 3: and that's what we want to look at in the series,
Speaker 3: specifically again focused on predators. What are preor is doing
Speaker 3: down there, What challenges to predators in the deep deep
Speaker 3: ocean face, and how do they make a living?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, so first and foremost we have to talk
Speaker 2: just briefly, I think about temperature and pressure. We've discussed
Speaker 2: the challenges of temperature and pressure and the deep ocean
Speaker 2: before and stuff to blow your mind. But we're talking
Speaker 2: about depths where sunlight does not reach and so too,
Speaker 2: the sun's heat does not quite reach it. Geothermal sources
Speaker 2: of heat acide. It's a realm of pretty chilling waters,
Speaker 2: and to be on the ocean floor is to feel
Speaker 2: the pressure of the water column on your back and
Speaker 2: upon all sides of you at once. Actually, the pressure
Speaker 2: at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is more than
Speaker 2: a thousand times that of the pressure at sea level.
Speaker 2: And meanwhile, the temperature down there is I've read on
Speaker 2: the order of like one to four degrees celsius or
Speaker 2: thirty four to thirty nine degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3: So an extreme environment, and organisms that want to adapt
Speaker 3: or evolve to survive there need to you need to
Speaker 3: make some pretty radical investments.
Speaker 2: That's right now. One thing that's interesting about the deep
Speaker 2: ocean is that it may at times seem like a contradiction.
Speaker 2: You know, it may seem like a contradictory realm because,
Speaker 2: on one hand, is pointed out by for example, the
Speaker 2: Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, it is a biologically diverse realm
Speaker 2: and one that ultimately constitutes ninety five percent of the
Speaker 2: Earth's living environment. If you consider the hard surface of
Speaker 2: a planet to be its core environment, so you know,
Speaker 2: not just talking about the surface that we know, but
Speaker 2: also the seafloor is being like the rocky surface, then
Speaker 2: the ethhotic zone. The dark ocean is the majority of
Speaker 2: the Earth. It's the realm. Alien observers might, by some
Speaker 2: metric consider the default tearan environment, you know, like on
Speaker 2: the rocky surface, covered by like crushing amounts of water
Speaker 2: and out reach of sunlight.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like terrestrial animals by comparison, are just the
Speaker 3: thing is living on certain mountaintops. That's right.
Speaker 2: The dark ocean entails the mesopo logic, the bathop logic,
Speaker 2: and the abyssopalalgic and the deepest hatopelagic zone, which is
Speaker 2: also known as the hatal zone. And again in the
Speaker 2: darkness here there is diversity, there is life.
Speaker 3: But that doesn't mean life there is easy, and in
Speaker 3: many ways in the deep ocean, animals may face some
Speaker 3: challenges that you might not think of, not just the
Speaker 3: cold and the darkness and the pressure, but maybe resource challenges.
Speaker 2: That's right. As pointed out by the likes of the NOAA,
Speaker 2: the deep ocean is a kind of food desert. Sunlight
Speaker 2: does not reach down to power photosynthesis, and so with
Speaker 2: the exception of chemosynthetic communities masked in close proximity around
Speaker 2: hydrothermal vents. These zones suffer from foods and this results
Speaker 2: in an overall lack of density in organisms. The main
Speaker 2: food sources that creatures in this region are going to
Speaker 2: depend on, They're going to depend on predation among fellow inhabitants.
Speaker 2: And then on the other hand, you also have the
Speaker 2: periodic megafeasts that occur when you have whale fall, when
Speaker 2: you have a particularly large organism that has died or
Speaker 2: is killed in the waters above and sinks down steadily
Speaker 2: towards the bottom. Now coming back to the Hadal zone specifically,
Speaker 2: here again the absolute deepest of the dark ocean realms.
Speaker 2: We're talking three point seven to six point eight miles
Speaker 2: or six to eleven kilometers beneath the waves. We're also
Speaker 2: talking about something that's a little different from the idea
Speaker 2: of just like expansive deserts of depth. We're talking again
Speaker 2: about long, narrow, topographic v shaped depressions. And so you
Speaker 2: might well wonder, okay, well, given there comparatively limited horizontal footprint,
Speaker 2: how often are there going to be sufficient falls, such
Speaker 2: as a whale fall of some sort to feed the
Speaker 2: Hatel zone. Again, if we were to think of it
Speaker 2: in terms of like the surface world. Imagine you know
Speaker 2: a topography and there's like a narrow canyon and they
Speaker 2: are creatures that live at the bottom of that canyon.
Speaker 2: How often is a big old condor or vulture going
Speaker 2: to fall out of the sky and feed them, right?
Speaker 2: So that's what I was, like, a long shot, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, it turns out maybe it's not that actually
Speaker 2: that big of a big of a deal, But that
Speaker 2: was my question that it was in my head, and
Speaker 2: that's what led me to look around, and indeed I
Speaker 2: found a paper by a desk Gupta at All from
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four titled Depth and Predation Regulate Consumption of
Speaker 2: Dolphin carcasses in the Hadel Zone. This is from Deep
Speaker 2: Sea Research Part one Oceanographic Research papers. So they point
Speaker 2: out that we've known about whale flight and smaller sized
Speaker 2: food falls for more than three decades, and with that
Speaker 2: the realization that these are important food sources for particularly
Speaker 2: for the deep kicking up temporary and something I mean
Speaker 2: also kind of not so temporary, as we'll discuss sea
Speaker 2: floor environments around the bounty. But such events in the
Speaker 2: Hadal zone were largely unknown and unstudied. So what did
Speaker 2: the researchers here decide to do. They said, well, let's
Speaker 2: orchestrate a couple of them. Let's drop some dead dolphins
Speaker 2: down a couple of trenches and watch and see what happens.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so this wouldn't be something that is totally artificial,
Speaker 3: like it never happens in nature. It's just rare enough
Speaker 3: that we know it's hard to like come across this naturally, right.
Speaker 2: And I want to stress that the authors here that
Speaker 2: they point out that whale falls are actually thought to
Speaker 2: occur with relative frequency in the deep ocean. So my
Speaker 2: question seems to largely just be dismissed, like it just
Speaker 2: it occurs, and there's no reason to think that it's
Speaker 2: especially rare. I think we have to remember that. Take
Speaker 2: the Mariana Trench for example. Yes, it's narrow compared to
Speaker 2: the expanse of ocean around it, but we're still talking
Speaker 2: about a feature that's five hundred miles long with an
Speaker 2: average width of about forty three miles. But still no
Speaker 2: hatl whale falls had ever been recorded. So that's why
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one, the researchers dunked a pair of
Speaker 2: Fraser's dolphins, one down the Mariana Trench and the other
Speaker 2: down the Philippine Basin.
Speaker 3: Okay, so the reason that was not recorded before is
Speaker 3: not because it doesn't happen, but because it's our limited
Speaker 3: ability to look for it. Naturally happened exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now I want to feature a little reminder here about
Speaker 2: sort of the phases. There are generally four phases of
Speaker 2: whale fall that are recognized by scientists. So, first of all,
Speaker 2: what happens again dead whale of one size or another
Speaker 2: sinks to the bottom and is now on the bottom
Speaker 2: of the ocean, some up through another The first stage
Speaker 2: is the mobile scavenger stage. Scavengers or necrophages arrive for
Speaker 2: the soft tissues, and the resulting feast can last for
Speaker 2: months or even over a year. It's going to ultimately
Speaker 2: depend on the exact environment and the size of the bounty.
Speaker 2: And one thing that is kind of fun to do
Speaker 2: is to think about these two in terms of you know,
Speaker 2: of a human scenario. Imagine prospectors discovering gold, oil, or
Speaker 2: some other desired resource and are previously unoccupied or scarcely
Speaker 2: occupied area. What sort of stages of development and then
Speaker 2: abandonment end up occurring. Okay, cool, okay. So first the
Speaker 2: mobile scavengers come. Then phase two is the enriched mint
Speaker 2: opportunist stage. This is when we get heterotrophic fauna arriving
Speaker 2: to colonize the surrounding sediments which are now infused with
Speaker 2: organics from the whalefall as well as the exposed bones
Speaker 2: of the whale. And this period can last months or
Speaker 2: even years. The third phase is the breakdown phase. This
Speaker 2: is when we have sulfophilic bacteria anaerobically breaking down the
Speaker 2: lipids embedded in the bones. This results in bacterial mats
Speaker 2: that provide sustenance for the various critters and this can
Speaker 2: take fifty to even one hundred years.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And then the final stage is the reef stage. This
Speaker 2: is when only minerals remain, creating a hard substrate for
Speaker 2: filter feeders such as deep sea sponges.
Speaker 3: And we've discussed before how just a just a hard
Speaker 3: surface raised up off of the seafloor is actually something
Speaker 3: that can be at a premium in the ocean.
Speaker 2: That's right, and this is one way that new solid
Speaker 2: outcroppings can be created in the long run. So again
Speaker 2: coming back to this, twenty twenty one research project. They
Speaker 2: dropped two dolphin carcasses, one down each trench, and then
Speaker 2: they used a man submersible to observe the initial phases
Speaker 2: of the whale fall. So nine dives were conducted over
Speaker 2: a period of eighty six days for the Philippine Basin
Speaker 2: and fifty days for the Mariana Trench. Now, the dolphins
Speaker 2: involved here are quite small by whale standards, so we're
Speaker 2: not talking this ultimately the same time frame as cited
Speaker 2: previously here, but the stages are still in play, and
Speaker 2: the researchers observed both of the initial stages, which we
Speaker 2: have to also point out do tend to overlap in
Speaker 2: general and overlapped here as well. So there's not a
Speaker 2: hard cutof there's nobody's blowing a whistle and saying, all right,
Speaker 2: that's it, opportunistic scavengers, get out of here. We got
Speaker 2: the next crew coming in. So what they observed with
Speaker 2: phase one they had hatl amphipods, which we were just
Speaker 2: talking about an example of that, as well as snail fish.
Speaker 2: These were found occurring at the whale drop in the
Speaker 2: Philippine Basin, and then just hadle amphipods. No snailfish at
Speaker 2: the Mariana Trench drop. So without the predatory snail fish
Speaker 2: in action, the scavengers, the scavenging amphipods at the Mariana
Speaker 2: Trench location, they were able to work faster, uninterrupted in
Speaker 2: their feeding, and consume most of the soft tissue in
Speaker 2: just a matter of days.
Speaker 3: Ah okay, that's interesting. Yeah, So the presence of secondary
Speaker 3: predators complicates how the initial resources are consumed. So the
Speaker 3: way the dolphin falls down and you've got these amphipods,
Speaker 3: you know, stripping, stripping the bones, eating all the soft tissue,
Speaker 3: But then you also could have predators there that limit
Speaker 3: the amphipod's ability to quickly consume the carcass.
Speaker 2: Right, And that's exactly how it seemed to go down
Speaker 2: at the Philippine Basin site, where the scavengers ended up
Speaker 2: having to take a ten day feeding break to avoid
Speaker 2: the snailfish. Now they observe that the second stage only
Speaker 2: attracted a few grazing organisms and quote the dispersed organic
Speaker 2: matter and limited lipid content in the dolphin bones were
Speaker 2: likely insufficient to sustain an active grazing community or the
Speaker 2: chemosynthetic community that typically typically follows. So larger whales would
Speaker 2: presumably sustain larger environments for longer. But one of the
Speaker 2: key ideas presented by the researchers here is that the
Speaker 2: exact shape and timeframe of a given whale fall is
Speaker 2: going to depend not only on the animals that sinks to,
Speaker 2: the depths, the size of the carcass, but also on
Speaker 2: the depth that it sinks to. You know, the exact location,
Speaker 2: and you know what sort of like local deep ocean
Speaker 2: environment is in play.
Speaker 3: Oh well, that totally makes sense. The same way if
Speaker 3: you like, well, i mean just on the surface, if
Speaker 3: you drop a dead animal somewhere, what happens to it
Speaker 3: afterwards would depend not only on what kind of the
Speaker 3: food quality of that dead animal is, but where you
Speaker 3: put it. So, you know, take a dead cow and
Speaker 3: you put it in the middle of the desert, something
Speaker 3: different is going to happen to it than if you
Speaker 3: take that same dead cow and you put it, you know,
Speaker 3: in the middle of the forest.
Speaker 2: It comes back to our example of the islands. If
Speaker 2: a large condor, let's say, falls dead out of the
Speaker 2: air and it lands on this island, and it lands
Speaker 2: on this island, like different things are likely going to
Speaker 2: eat it. Coconut crabs on one island, Komodo dragons on another,
Speaker 2: rats on yet another island.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, though I guess actually a better comparison
Speaker 3: than what I said would be would be different versions
Speaker 3: of a similar ecosystem, because here they're both talking about
Speaker 3: they're dropping it into the Hadel Zone, So it would
Speaker 3: be like dropping it into two different forests in different
Speaker 3: places on the Earth, so similar kind of environments, but
Speaker 3: still different local conditions and ecology.
Speaker 2: So again, outside of the vents like these and hydrothermal
Speaker 2: vent communities, there's just a lot of distance down there
Speaker 2: in the dark ocean, especially when you get into like
Speaker 2: the Hadel Zone. And we see that in the various
Speaker 2: ways that the denizens of the deep live their lives
Speaker 2: in terms of reproduction, but also in terms of how
Speaker 2: predators conducted their business, how they seek out their prey
Speaker 2: or allow their prey sometimes to find them, or position
Speaker 2: themselves in just the right place to where they will
Speaker 2: run into the things they want to eat.
Speaker 3: And so as we saw in the last example, sometimes
Speaker 3: that might mean not just chasing after the thing you
Speaker 3: want to eat, but going to where the thing you
Speaker 3: want to eat wants to eat.
Speaker 2: Is right right, And so for the remainder of this episode,
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk about one example of a predator
Speaker 2: of the deep of the deep ocean in general, but
Speaker 2: also as we'll get into seemingly of the hadel zone
Speaker 2: as well, and that is the general category of deep
Speaker 2: sea sciphonophores. Now, we've talked about siphonophores on the show before,
Speaker 2: and I know I've talked about easily the most famous
Speaker 2: sciphonophoor on Adam alias Stupendium before that is the Portuguese
Speaker 2: Man o War. This is not only the most famous
Speaker 2: siphono four, it was the first described by science in
Speaker 2: seventeen fifty eight and also essentially the only sciphono four
Speaker 2: with a common name.
Speaker 3: I mean, how often do you get to bring up
Speaker 3: a siphonophoor in conversation?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I mean, the thing about the Portuguese Man
Speaker 2: of War is that it is a siphonofour that lives
Speaker 2: at the surface of the water. It doesn't get any
Speaker 2: closer to us unless it, you know, gets washed up
Speaker 2: on the beach, as they may do, or if it
Speaker 2: were to actually crawl up and like enter our houses
Speaker 2: or something, which they're not doing. But yeah, siphonophores are
Speaker 2: just so endlessly weird and wonderful. They're hydrozoans, and they
Speaker 2: are so. They are aquatic invertebrates, but they are not jellyfish.
Speaker 2: They are not sea jellies. And the wild thing is
Speaker 2: they are not even individual organisms, but are rather colonial
Speaker 2: organisms made up of genetically identical but highly specialized polyps.
Speaker 2: So what you might mistake for a single organism's reproductive
Speaker 2: system with one of these critters you know, say, you know,
Speaker 2: is a like a digestive system, or an arm or
Speaker 2: a flotation bladder. Each of these is in fact an
Speaker 2: individual zooid. So each zooid is a multicellular animal unto
Speaker 2: itself that exists as part of a colonial hole, each
Speaker 2: comprising an essential system of that whole. So to employ
Speaker 2: an imperfect comparison here, if you know voltron, Voltron is
Speaker 2: a large mech mecha robot that is made out of
Speaker 2: smaller mecha lion robots, you know, that are piloted by humans.
Speaker 2: And except in this situation, imagine that the lions that
Speaker 2: form our voltron cannot exist separate from the hole. They
Speaker 2: cannot live on their own, and in fact are not
Speaker 2: just forming the legs and the arms and the torso
Speaker 2: in the head, but are forming things like the reproductive system,
Speaker 2: the vultron, digestive system and so forth. And generally the
Speaker 2: layout you'll see with one of these siphonophores is you'll
Speaker 2: have a section called the neumataphor, which provides buoyancy, and
Speaker 2: this is very obvious with the Portuguese Man of War.
Speaker 2: Then you have the nectosome, which is related to swimming,
Speaker 2: and the siphosome, which is related to feeding, reproductive capabilities,
Speaker 2: and defense. And they may seem like floaty and docile
Speaker 2: that like, and especially this is the case this may
Speaker 2: have seen the case with the Portuguese Man of War
Speaker 2: because they are kind of tossed about by the wind
Speaker 2: and the sea and are taken to certain extents, you know,
Speaker 2: where the sea is sending them. But siphino forests in general,
Speaker 2: they are predatory carnivores, and they are they're active predatory
Speaker 2: carnivores in their own peculiar way.
Speaker 3: It's actually a more horrify kind of predation and even
Speaker 3: than we're used to. You think a bit more like
Speaker 3: the blob.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it's like that level of just like
Speaker 2: you look at the body layout of one of these,
Speaker 2: and I guess they have more of a body layout
Speaker 2: than the blob, but it's still vastly inhuman and non
Speaker 2: mammalion non vertebrate, and even so different from the you know,
Speaker 2: invertebrate worlds of other animals. You can't just turn it
Speaker 2: around and say, oh, well that's the head and now
Speaker 2: it makes sense. No, Siphonophors are like weird no matter
Speaker 2: how you look at them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So one example of note here, the one will the
Speaker 2: best defines the discussion here today is the giant sephon
Speaker 2: a four or the prey a duvia. This is a
Speaker 2: tube shaped sephona four that can reach lengths of up
Speaker 2: to one hundred and thirty feet or forty meters. This
Speaker 2: is frequently pointed out to be as long as a
Speaker 2: blue whale, but also about as wide as a broom handle. What, yeah, that.
Speaker 3: Just seems like an animal body of that or it
Speaker 3: should not exist exactly.
Speaker 2: And this is like the only plays that could exist,
Speaker 2: you know, where they can have they kind of have
Speaker 2: the space to exist, but also they're ultimately delicate, dangerous
Speaker 2: to the creatures that they consume, but delicate, and they
Speaker 2: need a place where they're not going to be tossed
Speaker 2: around by the by the sea. Down here, it's relatively quiet.
Speaker 2: It's long tube like body maneuvers via pulsating meducie, and
Speaker 2: one end features a gas filled noumataphor to provide buoyancy.
Speaker 3: Okay, so it's got kind of a bubble that helps
Speaker 3: it negotiate where it floats to, and then it's got
Speaker 3: the pulsating you said, maneuvers with meducie. What are these
Speaker 3: threadlike or hair like things that project off of it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little little yeah, kind of wiggly bits, And
Speaker 2: the overall appearance of the creature, especially in sketches, is
Speaker 2: kind of like a weird alien like jelly pelvis bone
Speaker 2: that would be that would be the buoyancy providing noumataphor,
Speaker 2: and then it looks like there's kind of a noodle
Speaker 2: rib spiny length growing out of it. It reminds me
Speaker 2: a bit of illustrations of yokai that I've seen, particularly
Speaker 2: the rokuro Kubi yokai, where it's like a woman with
Speaker 2: a long snakelike neck, except in this case there's no body.
Speaker 2: It's just it's just a strange creature to behold.
Speaker 3: Super creepy, Yes, it's repulsion attraction reaction I'm having, like
Speaker 3: I don't want to get near it, but also want
Speaker 3: to wrap it around myself.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, Now, in a vast and sparsely populated environment,
Speaker 2: you've got to be swift, you got to be a patient,
Speaker 2: or you've got to be attractive. And I guess the
Speaker 2: giant Savana four seems to engage in a little bit
Speaker 2: of both patient and attractive because, on one hand, it
Speaker 2: uses bright blue bioluminescence to attract prey, and I'm to
Speaker 2: understand that they, like most siphonophores, are also fairly selective
Speaker 2: in this case, grab vitating to areas where favored prey
Speaker 2: are present or will be present. You know, there's some
Speaker 2: sort of they're going to go where the food is
Speaker 2: going to be, and then it can grab with its
Speaker 2: tentacles and sting with its nomaticists before passing the bits
Speaker 2: of now food its prey onto the digestive zooids that
Speaker 2: will carry on digestion.
Speaker 3: I'm curious, do you know why the bioluminescence works to
Speaker 3: attract prey, Like, what are the prey trying to get out?
Speaker 3: Or do the prey eat something that normally glows blue
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: Well. I should first of all stress that blue green
Speaker 2: light this tends to be the standard among bioluminescent animals
Speaker 2: in the deep. Sometimes red light is used for a
Speaker 2: different reason than we may get into later on. As
Speaker 2: for what the siphonof war in question here is doing,
Speaker 2: what is it mimicking? According to the Nterey Bay Aquarium's
Speaker 2: Wonderful overview page on bioluminescence, there are siphonophores that use
Speaker 2: this kind of bioluminescent lure to mimic the appearance of copods.
Speaker 2: This is a common prey organism for deep sea fishes,
Speaker 2: and so that seems to be what's probably going on here,
Speaker 2: mimicking one prey animal to attract in predators which then
Speaker 2: become the prey. Now, when it comes to the exact
Speaker 2: zones that we find the giants, I found a four
Speaker 2: in a lot of resources out there are pointing to
Speaker 2: the zones above the Hatel zone, so still the deep
Speaker 2: deep ocean, but not the deepest trenches. And yet on
Speaker 2: the other hand, there is also evidence that they do
Speaker 2: go into the Hatel waters or do reside there. Again,
Speaker 2: we have to remind ourselves that we don't know everything
Speaker 2: about these deep ocean trenches. They are mysterious places, and
Speaker 2: a lot of those mysteries remain. A lot more research
Speaker 2: and exploration is required, but there is some evidence that
Speaker 2: we do find giant sciphonophors or some type of sciphonophoor
Speaker 2: some related species in these waters, as we'll explain here.
Speaker 2: And I was reading about this in a twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one edition of the Journal of Plankton Research paper by
Speaker 2: Alan J. Jamison and Thomas D. Linley, and they said
Speaker 2: that we have observed a probable sciphonophour within the Mariana
Speaker 2: Trench at a depth of eighty eight meters, which is
Speaker 2: well within the Hadel zone. And I've included here for
Speaker 2: you as well, Joe. It's it's image C of the
Speaker 2: ABC image block that we're looking at here.
Speaker 3: Ooh, okay, so we're looking at a cameras have captured
Speaker 3: some stuff from the ocean floor and image C. It
Speaker 3: just looks like we're looking out into this blue water
Speaker 3: that's illuminated with our official light, of course, and then
Speaker 3: there's something that looks almost like a constellation of little
Speaker 3: little star like freckles kind of zipping around in a
Speaker 3: strange arrangement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what we're seeing here, apparently is that trailing link
Speaker 2: the siphosome. This is the part that is going to
Speaker 2: ultimately be fishing for prey. The net is out, as
Speaker 2: the authors here describe it. Again, we don't have enough
Speaker 2: evidence here to really tell exactly what species we're looking at,
Speaker 2: or you know, to make a case it is a
Speaker 2: new species, but they say that it's very likely a
Speaker 2: relative of the giant Sephono four, and it's probably a
Speaker 2: member of the same suborder. Full identification could not be made,
Speaker 2: but this evidence does seem to indicate that known and
Speaker 2: maybe unknown species of siphonophores do hunt in hatel waters.
Speaker 3: That's a whole other kind of deep sea horror.
Speaker 2: And Yeah, one of the things I love about the
Speaker 2: Sephonophores is that we I think, by you know, by
Speaker 2: this point, I mean, everyone's seen a lot of like
Speaker 2: really cool images of deep sea fish with their you know,
Speaker 2: translucent bodies, their needle like teeth and bioluminescent bulges and
Speaker 2: other strange properties. You're gonna make them very frightening. But
Speaker 2: it's almost like that's an extrapolation of a fish, and
Speaker 2: and we're prepared for that, but we're sometimes less prepared
Speaker 2: for just how again how weird seiphonophores are, even though
Speaker 2: we've also find siphonophores again at the surface of the
Speaker 2: ocean up there with the Portuguese Man of Wars. But yeah,
Speaker 2: they're these, like the giant siphonophor is just such a
Speaker 2: strange creature. And the idea that there are things like
Speaker 2: this just floating around and the deep ocean, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: making their way towards the places where their favored prey
Speaker 2: are found, and then casting their bioluminescent net in order
Speaker 2: to draw them in and then sting them as they
Speaker 2: brush up against them, and then pass them on to
Speaker 2: their you know, specific colonial zooids that are going to
Speaker 2: complete the digestion task.
Speaker 3: You'd have to think if one of those things get you,
Speaker 3: you'd just be like, fair enough, digest me. Well, that
Speaker 3: is a truly fascinating organism, and I think we're going
Speaker 3: to have to call it there for today on part
Speaker 3: one of this series, but we will be back with more.
Speaker 3: We're not done talking about predation in the deepest parts
Speaker 3: of the ocean. We'll have at least one more part
Speaker 3: for you, maybe more.
Speaker 2: That's right, we'll be back with maybe with some expected
Speaker 2: cases of deep sea predators, but also perhaps some unexpected
Speaker 2: examples as well. All Right, in the meantime, we just
Speaker 2: want to remind everyone that's stuffed auble. Your Mind is
Speaker 2: primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Speaker 2: Tuesdays and Thursdays. We air a short form episode on Wednesdays,
Speaker 2: and on Fridays. We set aside most series concerns to
Speaker 2: just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to su
Speaker 3: us to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
Speaker 3: your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.