The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Sea pig Chapter 25: Xenophyophore page 343: undersea mountains, abyssal plains . Deeper still are trenches, which teem with microsc...

The first genetic study of global giant squid populations shows that the mysterious animals are very similar to each other even though the...

The ocean floor is home to 2.9×10 29 single-celled organisms — that's 10 million trillion microbes for every human on the planet — b...

A scaly foot sea snail from the Dragon Vent . The scales are covered with layers of pure pyrite and iron sulphide.

A newish detail from the deep: huge currents hundreds of kilometres wide... picks up material from the vents and transports it long distanc...

I wrote in an earlier post that few creatures are as strange as the Ediacarian biota. One candidate may be Paleodictyon nodosum (perhaps ...

From NOAA via Deep Sea News :

On a human timescale, there is no sustainable harvest of [giant deep water corals]. We know next to nothing about how they spawn, settle and...

I spent a little time last week at the final meeting of HERMES , a Europe-wide research project on the deep seas, where participants delight...

In chapter 8 of Cold Water Corals [1], the authors ground their case for conservation on four norms for a philosophy of conservation biolog...

Chiasmodon niger , or the black swallower -- a deep-sea fish that can extend its stomach to three times its size to swallow fish that are la...

Deep Sea News celebrates the deepest known sea fan, 5,850 meters down. P.S. I was lucky enough once to spend a few hours with Stephen Cair...

I didn't know this : the oldest [known] animal in the oceans is a 4000-year-old cold-water coral. -- the redoubtable J. Murray Roberts.

We were looking for pretty animals that have eyes, are coloured, or glow in the dark; instead, the most interesting find was the organism th...

'Ocean oxygen deprivation', says Ralph Keeling , is the best phrase he has come up with so far to describe the diminution of dissolv...

Snailfish caught on video for the first time here . At 7,700 metres the pressure is 770 times atmospheric.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings was having trouble with beings beginning with X until Tom Goreau suggested the xenophyophores , giant s...

Erwan Roussel and colleagues help extend the known range of life with evidence suggesting that the sub-sea-floor biosphere extends to at lea...

Since Trieste 's historic descent, a robot called Kaiko has explored more of the hadal zone , discovering a fragile, floating world of ...