News
Source: Livescience
It may only be 40 seconds long, but the video captured by the Deep Discoverer is a fascinating look at the beautiful and mysterious world of the deep. The ROV, which is being operated by NOAA scientists from aboard the research vessel Okeanos Explorer, spotted an amazing sight: an alien jellyfish with long tentacles and a pulsating bell containing red and yellow glowing lights.
The surreal-looking little creature, which is from the genus Crossota, was spotted on April 24 at a depth of 12,140 feet (3,700 meters) in the Mariana Trench—the deepest part of the world’s oceans—at a spot called the Enigma Seamount, so-called because of the paucity of information known about it. And the “lights” inside the jelly’s bell? According to the researchers, they are apparently red canals joining luminous-yellow gonads.
The mission has revealed various other oddities, including, as the scientists wrote on their daily blog, “stalked crinoids and primnoid corals, swimming polychaete worms, a cusk eel, Caulophacus sponges, cladhorizid sponges, a Munidopsis squat lobster, a beautiful hydrozoan jellyfish, and at least two Nematocarcinus shrimp.”
Read more here and check out the video below.
