BRUCE ROBISON: Jellies are really
intriguing for lots of reasons.
In many respects, they're really beautiful animals.
The iridescence of ctenophores and the beautiful color
patterns of the muscle tissue of some jellies
have rainbow colors, and they can be extraordinarily pretty.
Jellies also are perfectly adapted to a three dimensional
watery habitat.
They can achieve remarkable sizes
and some extraordinary shapes that
allow them to function very differently than animals
in any other habitat on earth.
Back in the days when we sample the deep sea by dragging nets
behind ships, we thought that the principal components
of the deep sea communities were fish and squids and shrimps,
animals that had hard bodies.
Until very recently, we didn't appreciate
that gelatinous animals comprise as much as 30%, maybe 40%,
of the biomass in the deep sea water column.
KEVIN RASKOFF: One of the reasons
that we have been learning so much about jellyfish recently
in the last several decades is basically
because of the instrument that's behind me right now--
robotic submarines, person submersibles,
various sorts of specialized deep diving equipment
that allow us to take ourselves or to take
our eyes, in the form of a video signal, down into the water
and see what these animals were actually doing down there.
The Ventana has been a really workhorse ROV for us.
We've had that for upwards of 15 years now.
It just celebrated its 2,500th dive,
which makes it the most used ROV on the planet.
It has probably done more scientific dives
than all other scientific ROVs combined.
So it is truly a superstar, in terms of deep sea research.
SPEAKER 1: OK, heading down.
SPEAKER 2: Three, two, one, begin transect.
1,000 meters.
Oxygen is 0.38.
KEVIN RASKOFF: The kinds of work that we do on the Ventana fall
into two or three categories.
One of the most important things that we can do
is to build a quantitative time series of information
about the numbers and kinds of jellies
in Monterey Bay over time.
SPEAKER 2: You know that we're seeing the [INAUDIBLE] year
around.
SPEAKER 1: Is there history of that
in the past of year round populations?
SPEAKER 2: Not in our records.
KEVIN RASKOFF: We also spend a lot of time
using Ventana and it's high definition video camera
to watch behavior patterns.
SPEAKER 2: Well, they often feed on detritus that settles out
down the hairs on their long legs,
and they'll bring them across their mouth and scrape
the food off like that.
KEVIN RASKOFF: And finally, we use the ROV to collect animals.
One of the advantages of working on jellies
is that they're blind and deaf, and they
don't seem to mind at all when we fly up to them
and zoom in with our lights and cameras and the whirring
motors of the ROV.
In fact, most of the time, they have no idea
that they've been caught.
SPEAKER 1: All right.
Bravo.
SPEAKER 2: Nice.
SPEAKER 1: That was beautiful.
Way to go.
KEVIN RASKOFF: The wonderful thing
about the operations we have here at MBARI
is that we have a deep water canyon that
runs right off of shore.
And so within an hour or two, we can
be out into very deep water, which
means that when we collect something from very deep water,
we can be back to the lab within a few hours.
That's something that nobody else on the planet can do.
SPEAKER 1: Its tentacles are in great shape.
KEVIN RASKOFF: When we get them back to the lab,
what we do with them depends greatly on what
we know about these animals.
And often, we are the first people
that have ever seen these animals live with our own eyes.
And so sometimes, the very simplest of questions
like, what does it eat?
Or how does it eat?
Or does it reproduce?
At what times?
Or very simple questions that you usually
consider very fundamental, naturalist questions
that maybe a lot of people assume we already know
about everything on the planet.
We have absolutely no idea about what these jellyfish do.
BRUCE ROBISON: While we know a lot about jellies,
and are learning more at a pretty rapid pace,
we've still only explored a tiny fraction of the deep ocean.
And so we know relatively little about all the different kinds
of jellies that are out there.
So in terms of just discovering new kinds,
there's a huge amount to be learned.
And the biodiversity of this planet
will expand considerably once we are
able to catalog the deep living jellies.
KEVIN RASKOFF: The deep sea is a big place.
Of the available space for an animal
or a plant to live on the Earth, over 95%
is actually the deep sea.
MBARI, in Monterey Bay, has studied maybe 1% of this bay,
and it is by far the best studied deep sea environment
on the planet.
And so we have little tiny dots of information,
but we don't have large coverage.
We don't have good information for large areas of the planet.
This is true for jellyfish and everything else.
BRUCE ROBISON: When we're flying the Ventana down deep
into the Monterey Canyon, I'm always
hoping for something I can't expect,
the one thing that is going to knock my socks off
because it surprises me.
That's part of the fun of exploration
is that you know that you're going to find new things,
but you can't predict what they're going to be.
KEVIN RASKOFF: What's that?
SPEAKER 1: Oh, it's a squid.
BRUCE ROBISON: This is somebody new.
SPEAKER 2: Whoa.
BRUCE ROBISON: Really white.
KEVIN RASKOFF: We've never seen this guy before.
BRUCE ROBISON: Wow.
KEVIN RASKOFF: Wow.