Deep-sea vehicles spot 'alien' sharks deep beneath the waves in the Pacific

MostlyStable•about 2 hours ago

There are loads of unknown (to science) deep sea sharks out there, most of them quite small. A friend of mine in grad school spent several trips on a deep sea trawler out of Madagascar and described multiple new species.

doodlebugging•about 1 hour ago

Sometimes the first opportunity to see something occurs while you are actively destroying the habitat where it lives. Sounds like your friend's work took advantage of the access that deep sea trawlers would have to species unknown to science, allowing them to have a rough idea of their distribution. In a sense this is very useful to researchers who can argue the case that trawling is too destructive for that area due to the presence of species new to science.

Trawling and mining, both activities mentioned in the article, can be very destructive to habitats. With the global race to lock up sources of rare elements and elements that are more commonly found in conflict zone nations the sea floor is seen as the best source for some of these. The manganese nodules that I learned about in geoscience classes decades ago are targeted by miners today who will have no qualms about scraping the seafloor clean just as those fishing fleets strip the oceans of wild fish species.

gr_norm•about 1 hour ago

Wow! It's amazing how little it seems we've explored of the deep ocean, whenever I hear about it. A whole other world down there, lying in wait... the frontiers of our own planet have yet to be conquered!

randallsquared•about 1 hour ago

There's so many kinds of microbe we don't have catalogued. The last 30-40 years have been pretty astonishing in that regard.

everyone•about 1 hour ago

Could the light be blinding all the animals? I would assume their eyes would have evolved to be extremely sensitive to light.

triyambakam•about 1 hour ago

> the animal leisurely glid along the sea floor

Strange. I thought it was glided, or at least glode

ButlerianJihad•14 minutes ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glid

They are synonyms

IAmGraydon•about 1 hour ago

It is glided. "Glid" is not a word in the English language.

virtualwhys•37 minutes ago

Strange, I've always used glid, glided is so cumbersome in comparison.

Deep-sea vehicles spot 'alien' sharks deep beneath the waves in the Pacific

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