Like most deep-sea biologists, I have a large collection of decorated Styrofoam cups. A couple dozen line the bookshelf of my office, each displaying a rainbow of Sharpie colors. Each cup is ...

The ROV Global Explorer reaches bottom at around 9:01 am, nearly 3.5 kilometers deep in the Gulf of Mexico. The 1.5-ton machine flies nimbly through a shallow valley before rising up and over a peak.

Mr. Terry Kerby, our submersible pilot, greeted each animal like an old friend (This was the Pisces V’s 889 th dive, after all). Barracks, rattails, Chaunax, Callogorgia, Corallium, Desmophyllym, ...

Osedax worms, or the ‘bone eating’ worms are little soft sacks resembling snotty little flowers. The “bone devourer” is not quite accurate as the worms do not actually feed on the bone mineral, but ...

A new species of deep-sea cucumber has over 100 feet in alternating two or three rows. This means of course that when it plays the This Little Piggy nursery rhyme it needs to repeat it 25 times. The ...

Schmidt Ocean has posted new 4K video of a suite of amazing organisms from seamounts of the coast of Chile. I, however, strongly feel the video should have been accompanied by Chilean music. So set ...

“Tomopterids are pelagic polycheate (segmented worm) with paddle-like parapodia that propel them through the water column. They are relatively common in the deep mesopelagic, or twighlight zone, and ...

Basket stars, so named for the dizzying and multi-branching nature of their convoluted arms, often perch atop coral or rocky formations. From this high mount, the basket star cna extends its arms in ...

At a recent NOAA workshop, another participant gifted all of us these wonderful "hard hat" float ornaments. The perfect blend of nerdy oceanography and 3-D printing. To explain what these are to the ...

Earlier this year I warned that The Ocean Cleanup would catch and kill floating marine life. This week they announced they're collecting plastic, and their picture shows HUNDREDS of floating animals ...

The video is the actual video from my research group’s dive with a remotely operated vehicle in the deep Gulf of Mexico. The background on all this alligatorfall project and why a bunch of scientists ...

Howard Sanders began by writing “Specialization” on the whiteboard with his paper introducing the Stability-Time Hypothesis in 1968. He suggested that because the deep sea is monotonous and ...