Xiao, Yunlu, and Haibin Zhang. ” Three new species and one new record of Deimatidae (Echinodermata, Holothuroidea, Synallactida) discovered in the South China Sea and the Mariana fore-arc area using integrative taxonomic methods.” ZooKeys 1195 (2024): 309.

The post New Deep-Sea Cucumber Has 100 Feet first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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 the Schmidt video to mute and play this instead or go here to this rather busy remix.

The post Seamounts of the Southeast Pacific first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In this luminescent tapestry, sea cucumbers emerge as unexpected stars. While we might not associate these echinoderms with bioluminescence, they contribute significantly to the underwater light show. Interestingly, in shallow waters, only a mere 1% of species can emit light, whereas the seafloor teems with bioluminescent activity, showcasing the radiant abilities of over 50% of its inhabitants. Venture to the depths of one kilometer, and you’ll find that luminous sea cucumbers constitute an astonishing 99% of all sea cucumbers.

Research by Manabu Bessho-Uehara, Jerrome Mallefet, and Steven Haddock have cast light on the bioluminescent secrets of sea cucumbers. Documenting not only 42 known species of glowing sea cucumbers but also six independent evolutions of bioluminescence within the sea cucumber lineage. The earliest illuminated sea cucumber may have been nearly 400 million years to the Devonian era, coinciding with the establishment of the first land animals.

While the precise details of how sea cucumbers produce their blue to greenish bioluminescence remain a mystery, the process involves a small organic compound known as luciferin. This compound is catalyzed to oxidize by an enzyme fittingly named luciferase.

The question of why sea cucumbers, or holothurians, need bioluminescence remains unanswered. Like other organisms that exhibit this phenomenon, the glow may serve various purposes. From communication to startling, misdirecting, and warning predators, to attracting, stunning, or illuminating prey, and even facilitating mate recognition—the role of bioluminescence in sea cucumbers raises intriguing hypotheses. One such theory suggests that it functions as a burglar alarm, attracting larger predators to deter potential threats—a fascinating manifestation of the age-old adage, “the enemy of my friend is my friend.”

Photos from : Bessho-Uehara, Manabu, Jérôme Mallefet, and Steven HD Haddock. “Glowing sea cucumbers: Bioluminescence in the Holothuroidea.” The world of sea cucumbers. Academic Press, 2024. 361-375

The post Holy Glowing Sea Cucumbers! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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 faster moving waters away from the seafloor to ensnare drifting zooplankton for food. Its arms, equipped with tiny hooks and sticky mucus, capture prey that gets passed to its central mouth.

The post Arms of the Abyss first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Experience the Life of the Deep Gulf of Mexico in 20 Videos first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The goal was to create a tree where the top represented the ocean’s surface and the base representing the abyssal floor. With a series of white, blue, and black ribbon and silver and blue miniature bulb ornaments, we created the effect of attenuated light as you move deeper. We wanted to make sure to include both a remotely operated vehicle on a lighted tether as well as lighted bathysphere. The tree also included a giant squid attacking a shark and whale fall complete with crabs and eels. We also made some tiny experimental wood falls to resemble the real ones we now have deployed all over the Gulf of Mexico.

You can print all of these decorations yourself. The complete collection can be found in my Thingiverse collection and include:

• The research vessel on top is the ICE – the icebreaker by vandragon_de (with the addition of little printed A-frame for the aft deck.
• The basic and blocky (or to sound like a sophisticated maker low-poly) remote operated vehicle was designed by us.
• Giant Squid by TheGreenFilament
• Shark! Sliced to Print by MacGyver
• Starfish model by Empiricus
• The Voyage of the Bathysphere by themindseye
• LOW POLY CRAB by RaffoSan (for whale fall)
• Eel by Benc (for whale fall)
• Whale by YahooJAPAN (whale for whale fall)
• Giant Deep-sea Isopod by the one and only Andrew_Thaler. (The model is actually based on a real specimen in our lab.)
• Puffer Fish (of awesomeness) by Dinoman (garland)
• A simple log by Montravont
• Vampire Squid by sinryan
• Hammerhead Shark by pmoews

The post 3-D Printing the Ulitmate Deep-Sea Christmas Tree first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I was just listening to a podcast about how sea sponges use the pores all over their body to “bring in food and release wastes” and I’m pretty sure that’s a scientific way of saying the holes in sponges are all just mouths and buttholes so does that mean that when I’m using a sponge in the shower I’m cleaning my body with mouths and buttholes? Someone get me a marine biologist. And a loofah. And maybe some bleach.  -The Bloggess

All around you are animals with a single hole serving as both a mouth and anus.  These mono-orifice animals have an incomplete digestive system.  In contrast, those animals blessed with two holes, a tubular digestive system with an in and out hole, possess a complete digestive system.

Sponges are a bit of a unique case as a loose conglomeration of cells in a body full of pores and channels.  None of this really resembles organs or a digestive system with digesting occurring within individual cells.  However, the Cnidarians, including jellyfish, anemones, and corals,  are all uni-aperture.  We can also add the Ctenophores, the comb jellies, into this lone door group of animals.

In the flatworms, the Platyhelminthes, its mixed bag of one, two, and even more bodily gateways.  Most flatworms have no anus, but some particularly long species do possess an anus. In rare cases, flatworms with very complex branch guts can have more than one anus.  By the way, the plural can be either anuses or ani.

Peeping at the underside of a starfish, you might have only noticed a giant mouth.  You may be thinking to yourself, “I’ve never seen another opening.  Do starfishes have an anus?”  Of course, this is one of the great questions of life.  Indeed,  most starfishes have a complete digestive system with the anus being a small opening on the top. However, there is a large order of starfish, the Paxillosida, that lack an anus.  The only other group of Echinoderms to lack an anus, and even an intestine, is the brittle stars.

A solitary black hole may also occur during specific phases of animals life cycle.  An incomplete digestive system is known in some insects including the sap-sucking aphid relatives, the Phylloxera, during their sexual phase.  Some larvae including those of some fish and proboscis worms can be anally deficient.  Certain lifestyles also can lead to solo agujero such as in parasitic species, like parasitic copepods.

It’s important to remember that all animals start development with one hole, the blastopore.  In the ventrally chosen, a second hole forms later.  So the question remains if some animals form only a single hole is it a mouth that used as anus or anus used as a mouth?  The proverbial digestive pore chicken and egg scenario.

As described in this excellent post, 

Blastopore formation is started by a protein called disheveled, which gets stuck at the top of the egg and then activates a specific set of genes. In the same location of jellyfish embryos, however, there are genes strikingly similar to the mouth genes of bilaterians. In the sea urchin, a bilaterian, these same mouth genes are also on the top of the embryo. However, disheveled has moved to the bottom. The blastopore forms at this new site of disheveled accumulation, rather than at the mouth. The mouth genes that remain on top still direct the formation of the mouth there. Martindale and Hejnol posit that moving disheveled from the top to the bottom of the embryo in some animals moved the location of blastopore, but that the mouth stayed put. In some bilaterians, like urchins and humans, the blastopore then became the anus. In this scenario all mouths are homologous to each other, whether the animal has one or two holes.

Evolution can be a truly wonderful thing and then sometimes it can produce an animal with a mouth that still uses its anus to feed.

The post A Tale of One Opening first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Take a break from the madness of #blackfriday2018 & marvel at these swimming sea cucumbers, seen during recent #Okeanos expedition: https://t.co/HneVxh2JiI pic.twitter.com/MEYO9OKmQb

— NOAA Ocean Explorer (@oceanexplorer) November 23, 2018

From by Dr. Chris Mah, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, November 7, 2018, and posted at OceanExplorer.  (check Dr. Mah on his blog, Echinoblog, and on Twitter @echinoblog).

The swimming sea cucumber, Enypniastes eximia, sometimes referred to as the “headless chicken monster,” is a widespread species present in the abyss. It is encountered widely around the world with records from the Gulf of Mexico, Tropical Atlantic, East Atlantic, New Zealand, and the Southern Ocean (Antarctica). The scientific name Enypniastes was assigned to this animal in 1882 and means “dreamer;” it was taken from Genesis 37:19 of the Septuagint: “… Behold, that dreamer comes.”

Read more at NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

The post Holothurian Hill first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post The Fantastical Beasts of the Deep Gulf of Mexico first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Look at These Amazing Deep-Sea Creatures from the Remote Pacific Right Now first appeared on Deep Sea News.