This Elusive Antarctic Squid Was Seen for the First Time

The surroundings in the high seas of the Polish of the land house mysterious oceanic creatures: giant spiders, sea pigs in Antarctic, ghost jellyfish. However, finding and identifying these animals can be difficult; Some are only known because researchers have found their remains in fishing nets or in sea birds’ belly. But on Christmas day from last year, the R / V Falkor crew (also), the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research ship saw a creature never seen alive.

This particular dive was part of The National Geographic And Rolex Perpetual Planet Expedition, an initiative aimed at documenting climate change in mountains, tropical forests and oceans.

The team had planned to deploy their vehicle remotely, Subastian, in a site known as Basin Powell, but the movement of the ice blocks forced the group to explore the exterior edges of the region instead.

When the submersible fell 7,000 feet, the team unexpectedly spotted a shadow through the live flow, which turned out to be an antarctic calmar gonate, a rare species of cephalopod, three feet long and release a green cloud of ink.

“It was a beautiful calmar,” said Andrew Thurber, a researcher on the high seas at the University of California in Santa Barbara, who was aboard the ship. “You see beauty all the time in the deep ocean, and it was just a classic example of it.”

No Squid Gonate Antarctic had never been seen alive before, with regard to the team. They followed him for a few minutes and made sure to record it on the video, capturing the red coloring of the creature and the white spots of the creature.

“Videos like this really make me excite,” said Linsey Sala, a museum scientist who manages the pelagic collection of invertebrates with institution of oceanography and was not involved in the expedition. The discoveries of species like this “can be really informative of the way in which they experience life at great depths,” said Ms. Sala. Unidentified specimens could be seated in collections around the world, she added, in which case the video sequences could be useful to reveal what they are.

The previous observations of this species of calmar were limited to individuals captured by fishing ships and leftover calmar found in other marine animals, mainly in the Falkland Islands.

“It is always exciting to see images live from a creature that was known only of deadly specimens before,” said Bruce Robison, a deep sea environment at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who was not involved in the expedition either.

For those on board the ship, the discovery was “pure elation,” said Dr. Thurber. There was an excitement fever before even having correctly identified the calmar. To check the species, Dr. Thurber and his colleagues sent the images captured by the submarine vehicle to taxomists around the world.

Kat Bolstad, a cephalopod biologist at the University of Auckland Technology in New Zealand, helped identify the animal. Calmar sex and age were difficult to determine, but the single at each tentacle, seen through the images sent to it, confirmed that the species was Gonatus Antarcticus.

The hooks could be useful for securing and locking on prey, a characteristic shared with other calmars. Cammar also had stripes on his arms and brands of suction cup on his coat, perhaps from a recent attack by another marine creature.

Calmars on the high seas are difficult to meet and document. Research thousands of meters below the surface of the sea is difficult and costly, and animals tend to avoid vehicles from a distance exploited, which are often noisy and shiny. These vehicles are “foreigners of the depths,” said Dr. Thurber. “So it really depends on them to come and watch us.”

It was not the first elusive Cammar to be filmed by Subastian, the remote vehicle used. This year, the submersible too seen a colossal calmarMesonychotuthis Hamiltoni, a century after the animal was described for the first time in a scientific article.

But we know much less about the calmar of Antarctic Gonate, which lives in the waters of the southern ocean and appears at depths less than 2,000 feet.

Penguins in the region are known to feast on Calmar by Antarctic Gonate – anyway smaller. They are also practical by colossal calmars, which share the same depths and the same waters.

Discovery promises to shed light on the life of the calms of the Antarctic Gonate and puts even more questions. How far do these calmars move? What is the width of their range? What are they feeding in the depths? How big is they develop?

“We know so little about this community that there could be all kinds of things that we can only ask ourselves,” said Dr. Robison.