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[Bell rings and sound of rushing water]
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Mike Ford: On April 10th, 2015
the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer was working
about 40 kilometers off the coast of Puerto Rico.
I was part of the shoreside science team,
and I was working in the exploration command center
at NOAA headquarters and through
satellite telepresence we’re able to be connected
to our ships at sea in near real time.
We had the ROV Deep Discoverer
diving at about 4000 meters
on Arecibo amphitheater
which is a canyon not far
from the Puerto Rico trench.
Deep Discoverer is a remotely operated vehicle.
It’s unmanned and it’s tethered to the ship.
It has a fantastic high definition camera system,
so it brings back some stunning imagery.
The vehicle was making a move up a slope, it was rocky.
We came upon this gelatinous animal
just above the sea floor. It looked very different.
Ctenophores are Comb Jellies.
They have these rows of cilia combs.
And when they pulsate the light refracts back
and it’s a prism kind of light effect
and so when you see that it’s your instant clue
that this is a Ctenophore.
But it was unlike Ctenophores I’ve seen before.
We were lucky on the dive.
We actually got to see three different animals
on three separate occasions
and on that second observation
we got a fantastic zoom on the high def.
We saw lots of detail.
After the dive that day, one of the first people
I contacted was my friend and colleague Allen Collins.
Allen is an expert in jellyfish.
Allen Collins: When I saw this thing,
I just thought that is so weird looking.
It’s like a, like a party balloon only instead of
sort of having one string hanging down,
it’s got two little dangly bits and
on each of those dangly bits is a tentacle.
I’ve never seen a ctenophore like that before.
I thought that there was at least a possibility
that it was a new species.
[Control voice: Pilot can we turn on the lasers?]
Mike Ford: Our ROV camera has lasers
that provide a scale for us to be able to
measure things in the deep ocean.
We saw that the animal itself was about 6 centimeters tall.
But its tentacles were very long, 30 centimeters long.
The animal had this kind of bulbous body at the top
and then very long trailing tentacles.
We were lucky to have essentially
a discovery within a discovery.
On one of the video clips we got to see some behavior
and those images and sequences of behavior are very exciting.
Typically, new species are described by taking samples,
taking animals back up into the lab,
and doing a lot of laboratory analysis
both on the microscope and with genetic tissue.
Allen Collins: Back when this was seen in 2015
the ROV Deep Discoverer wasn’t equipped to do any sampling
so we had to rely solely on the high definition video.
Mike Ford: The process of describing a new genus
and a new species takes a long time.
In our case it took five years.
We were re-examining the video and then
we spent a lot of time communicating with other scientists
on what we had found,
and then it was doing the research,
going through all of the literature.
In the end we described a new genus
and a new species inside ctenophores.
Allen Collins: What I hope is that it will be discovered again,
and it will be sampled so that we can
get access to the information that’s in the genome.
Mike Ford: If they do and take a sample
it would unlock an enormous amount
of additional information.
Allen Collins: There are about
a quarter million species known in the sea.
There are numbers of species that have been seen
only a handful of times. It is possible
that it could be years, decades,
maybe even a century before this species is encountered again.
It’s one of the things that makes
the whole Okeanos Explorer operation so wonderful
you never know what you’re going to see
and often when you see something
it’s never been seen before.
Michael Ford: Anytime we encounter something new,
anytime we encounter something exciting
like this discovery,
we add to the understanding
people have about the ocean.
[Control room voices]
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