With a few flicks of the wrist, the pilots scooped up the invertebrate and deposited it in a drawer on the vehicle.Īfter more than five hours in the midnight zone, the vehicle returned to the surface with its drawers and cylinders full of sea stars, nudibranchs, worms and sponges. A few minutes later the crew found another specimen sitting on a thick layer of detritus.
The pilots decided to leave the dismembered organism on the seafloor, where it would have a better chance of survival. Several of the sea star’s arms soon popped off. “I don’t know, man, these things are not easy,” replied Scott Hansen, Mr. “Can you come in from there?” said DJ Osborne, one of the Ventana’s pilots, pointing to the right side of the star. In the ship’s control room, the song “Under Pressure,” by Queen and David Bowie, played as pilots from the research institute directed the Ventana, one of their larger remote-operated vehicles. The creatures they sought were hidden by darkness in an underwater canyon that, although starting just hundreds of feet from shore, is as deep and steep as the Grand Canyon. They were searching Monterey Bay’s submarine canyon for bottom-dwelling species to scoop up, study and hopefully put on display. On a sunny day in mid-February, before the coronavirus pandemic halted operations, scientists from MBARI and aquarists from Monterey Bay headed out aboard the Rachel Carson, a 135-foot-long deep-sea research vessel. With the advance of technology, it is finally becoming possible to bring some of these fragile beings to the surface. Many of these organisms possess soft, gelatinous bodies - an adaptation to the physical pressures of the ocean depths, but which at sea level provides all the structural integrity of a wet Kleenex. The Monterey Bay Aquarium and its partner organization, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), both backed by the Packard Foundation, have two large ships and several remotely operated vehicles at their disposal, some with robotic arms, high-definition cameras, state-of-the-art sensors and a variety of devices designed to suck and grab delicate deep-sea animals from the water.
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