Bizarre Creatures of the Deep Sea | Compilation

[Music] let's be real there are some weird animals out there but few environments have produced stranger creatures than the deep ocean evolving in a dark cold high pressure environment like the bottom of the sea will do some bizarre things to your biology so it's no surprise that we've talked about a lot of these creatures over the years and now it's time for a highlight reel first up we've got a worm that makes absolutely no sense to our human understanding of things because its gut has no way in or out how does it get food how does it produce waste and why is it like this i'll pass the baton to hank there are plenty of creatures out there in the world with only one opening to handle the business of both taking in food and getting rid of the leftovers jellyfish for example get along fine with a mouth that is also an anus but there's at least one animal out there that doesn't have a gut opening at all the giant tube worm riftia pachyptilla lives over a kilometer deep in the ocean along ocean ridges where hydrothermal vents are common in spew-boiling hot chemical-laden water into the freezing cold deep sea these chemicals include stuff like hydrogen sulfide which isn't all that great for most animals but these bizarre looking worms are adapted to live in this hostile habitat without so much as a mouth to make things easier riftia almost looks like a lipstick with their vivid red plumes and tube-like outer casing within they have a structure called a trophosome which is like a gut but with no way in or out they were first discovered in 1977 when the submarine alvin accidentally landed on a cluster of them while it was investigating hydrothermal vents near the galapagos red blood gushed up around the sub the researchers on board later discovered that the tube worms plume has blood vessels full of hemoglobin in us mammals hemoglobin is mainly responsible for transporting oxygen in riftia the tube worm's plume acts like a gill its hemoglobin helps pull that hydrogen sulfide from the vent water and move it into the trophosome inside the trophosome are millions of symbiotic bacteria accounting for up to half of the body weight of the worm the bacteria are able to convert the toxic vent water chemicals into a food source for the worm through a process called chemosynthesis much like plants use photosynthesis to produce food using sunlight these bacteria are getting their food through chemical reactions that use hydrogen sulfide to produce energy and the inside of a worm it turns out is a much better habitat for them than the open vents or so the hypothesis goes not only have the bacteria turn this hostile environment into an advantage the worms have capitalized right along with them and they don't need a mouth or anus they just get fed by their bacterial partners which produce enough food to keep everyone happy it's like having your kitchen in your body okay so that's how the food gets in but how does it get out well the waste produced from digesting this food can be transported back out via the worm's bloodstream there's no need for either a mouth or an anus but this makes you want to ask another question if there's no way in or out how do those bacteria get in there researchers asked this question back in 2006 and found that it's it's it's weird the bacteria enter through the tube worms skin when it's still a larva so basically this is a bacterial infection hydrothermal vents are an unpredictable place to call home thanks to the constant tectonic activity happening along ocean ridges they may be there one day and gone the next once the vents stop venting the tube worms die because their bacteria's food source gets cut off the distance between them can be several miles which is a long swim when you're a little worm so researchers aren't sure how tube worm larva get from place to place without a food source hypotheses range from whale falls to shipwrecks which could supply enough of the chemicals the bacteria need to stay alive the discovery of these weird worms and their unique way of eating has led to researchers finding chemosynthetic communities and ecosystems around the world from elsewhere in the ocean to yellowstone national park who knew a giant mouthless buttless worm could completely redefine the way we thought about how life works on our planet okay so that generally makes sense but that worm is by no means the only weird eater in the ocean there's also a fish called the black swallower and if you thought those hot dog eating contests were impressive they have nothing on this thing here's one from olivia compared to other creepy deep water critters like gulper eels or anglerfish chiasmadon niger looks pretty unassuming kind of like an ugly anchovy it grows to about 25 centimeters long and is found all around the world at about 700 to 2800 meters deep in what scientists call the twilight and midnight zones of the ocean because there is so little light and while chiasmadon is not you know a beautiful fish with its rows of long needle-like teeth and a mostly scaleless body it's still pretty normal looking as long as you catch it before it eats its common name is the black swallower because it can eat meals several times larger than itself and make competitive eaters worldwide jealous of its stretchy stomach in 2007 a fisherman off the cayman islands found a dead 19 centimeter long black swallower floating on the surface of the ocean inside its guts was an 86 centimeter long snake mackerel that's four times as long as the swallower other reports suggest they can eat meals 12 times their mass if humans could eat that much in one sitting the world record for competitive hot dog eating would be closer to 8 500 hot dogs rather than just over 70. swallowers manage this incredible feat of gastronomy thanks to their large mouths and very elastic stomachs which can expand so far that the skin becomes thin enough to see through fish in the swallower family also have pelvic fins that aren't fused much like the lower jaw bones in a snake so they can stretch their chest to make room when their belly expands ichthyologists think that when swallowers hunt they first seize their victim by the tail and then bit by bit scoot the jaws up like a boa constrictor until the luckless prey is completely engulfed and it makes sense that they've evolved the ability to eat pretty much anything they can get their big mouths around down in the deep ocean where food can be pretty scarce having that kind of flexibility would be a great adaptation for survival but no one knows yet exactly how they pull it off when snakes eat a big meal they have to ramp up their metabolism and even in large organs like their liver and heart to fully digest their food it's likely these little fish have evolved similar ways to cope with such large meals but their big appetites can sometimes get the better of them digestive juices can only work so fast and if a meal is just too big like a nearly 90 centimeter long snake mackerel the prey can start to rot and decompose inside the stomach like all rotting food a decomposing meal releases gases and these can inflate the swallower's stomach like a balloon lifting the creature to the surface of the ocean and killing it that's what happened to the one from the cayman islands and it's actually how we first discovered this species back in the 1860s in fact for over a century their habit of fatally overeating was the main way scientists collected specimens other than a few that were dragged up by deep water fishing now thanks to better deep sea vehicles we're able to spy on them in their natural habitat in 2017 for instance a noaa rover spotted one in the gulf of mexico with a bit more of a dignified profile and unsurprisingly a very full belly you know when they aren't totally stuffed they're actually kind of cute not this next fish though it's got a terrifying maw not that you'd notice in the water because to blend in in the deep this thing has evolved transparent teeth here's another one from hank meet aristostamius scintillans a species of fish that lives in the deep dark waters hundreds of meters beneath the surface of the pacific it's occasionally called the shiny loose jaw because sometimes when you name a thing you just call him like you see him the animal is part of the dragonfish family and like most of its relatives it's a creepy looking thing with a disproportionately huge jaw long pointy teeth and a bioluminescent barbel for attracting prey but of all the dragon fish which are wonderful this one is special it's tiny usually only about 15 centimeters long but it's also a fierce hunter with an amazing adaptation to catch prey the fish has fangs that are transparent most animals teeth are and this probably won't be surprising not transparent vertebrate teeth are typically hard calcified structures in the mouth and although they're not quite the same they tend to look pretty similar to bone they have an inner layer of what's called dentin and an outer hard layer called enamel and they look opaque because they reflect absorb or scatter most light this dragon fish has a much more unique situation because its tooth composition is very different from what we see elsewhere both the enamel and the dentin are made of unique mineral matrices containing nanoscale crystal rods basically very tiny crystals they're even smaller than the wavelengths of light that normally hit them which means they scatter barely any light instead the light can go right through their teeth additionally these teeth don't have dentin tubules these are little channels that run through our teeth and they're a major place where light gets scattered so not having them helps this dragonfish keep its mouth crystal clear this is all super cool but there's still pretty big question here what's the point of having clear teeth it seems like they're working pretty hard for this so why well that comes down to the dragonfish's hunting style these things swim around with their mouths open and when some unsuspecting prey gets too close their mouths snap shut like traps so the point of this fish's transparent teeth is to make its maw virtually undetectable by prey by not reflecting any of the dim light in the deep ocean combined with the dark color of its body this gives the species a unique level of stealth as it hunts this fish is very cool in its own right but there's actually something beyond just the wow factor here because researchers are hoping to use this animal as inspiration for advancing material science engineers aim to copy the nano structure of these teeth to make transparent ceramics which would be used for super strong armored windows laser housings and other tech this is just one example of biomimicry a field of engineering that aims to adapt the awesomeness of nature into useful technology biomimicry has led to better bullet trains based on bird beak shapes more sustainable building ventilation based on termite mounds and much much more so i guess like never be afraid to look a gift dragon fish in the mouth now not all weird things in the ocean are strange because of their eating habits other animals just exist to defy our understanding of what life is capable of like these next animals they don't even need oxygen to survive here's olivia with more i don't know if you've noticed but animals kind of need oxygen that's because animals generally get their energy from cellular structures called mitochondria and those processes require oxygen to work so if somebody stole all of the earth's o2 things would end pretty quickly around here except as it turns out there are at least some animals that would be perfectly fine because in 2010 scientists published a paper announcing that they'd found three species of them that straight up don't need oxygen now to be clear not all life needs oxygen there are plenty of single-celled microbes that are anaerobic meaning they can survive just fine without the stuff instead of oxygen these organisms can use other molecules like sulfate or nitrate but for years scientists thought a system like that wouldn't work for animals since their complex multicellular bodies have higher energy requirements instead they thought animals needed the more efficient energy production that takes place in mitochondria and then came that 2010 paper this discovery happened in the la delante basin three thousand meters below the surface of the mediterranean sea lodoland is a deep hyper salient and toxic basin meaning it's super salty and completely devoid of oxygen it's the kind of place you wouldn't expect to find animals and indeed when a research team visited three times between 1998 and 2008 that's generally what they saw they did find a lot of single-celled organisms living in the basin but most of the animals they saw were dead the result of a so-called rain of cadavers from oxygenated waters above most of the animals but not all of them because the team also found an unusually high abundance of tiny sediment dwelling animals called loraciferins and they were seemingly very alive lorociferons are pretty weird creatures to begin with their heads are covered in spines and their bodies are typically encased in a vase-like shell called a lorika but finding them in an oxygen-free basin was a whole new level of weird the researchers observed that the lorociferins were still taking up nutrients and that some had recently molted some even had developing offspring inside them so these animals apparently spend their lives buried in this sediment with no oxygen not only surviving but thriving part of this incredible survival might be down to their size at less than one millimeter long lorociferins have pretty low energy needs but they also seem to have some unique adaptations for one thing they don't have mitochondria instead they have cellular structures that look a lot like hydrogenasomes these are organelles that some microbes use to produce energy and they use hydrogen ions in place of oxygen alongside these structures the researchers also noticed shapes that might be microbes living inside the lorociferin cells that's intriguing because some anaerobic single-celled organisms also have symbiotic microbes that live alongside their hydrogenosomes all in all it looks like these lorociferons have developed similar cellular structures to anaerobic microbes for living in the same way although it's not clear how they did this one option is that they retained these adaptations from an earlier ancestor more similar to anaerobic microbes but it's also possible that their ancestors swiped genes from their microbial neighbors allowing them to use the same cellular tricks for survival of course this is an extraordinary claim and some researchers have doubts for example a study published in 2015 looked in the same basin and was unable to find independent evidence of living lorociferens the researchers of the original study are still confident in their results but it may take more confirmation to convince everyone if these results do hold up though it could change how we understand the requirements of complex life it would have implications for the diversity of animal life in the world today for scientists interested in how life got started on an oxygen deficient early earth and maybe even for scientists looking for life elsewhere in the solar system ultimately life is so adaptable and endlessly diverse that we wouldn't be shocked if there are more surprises to be found finally to close out this whole saga let's wind down with a deep sea jellyfish we still don't entirely understand this creature is weird in its own right but it also has a quirk no one can explain it seems to keep some kind of pet here's one last episode from stefan imagine you're cruising the ocean in a submarine and your lights illuminate what looks like a large plastic bag floating through the water well a lot of trash ends up in the ocean so this doesn't seem like a complete surprise until the bag begins to change shape and then you realize it's an animal meet deep starria this weird looking creature has been mistaken for a lot of things including a whale placenta and a sea monster as well as a garbage bag and less often it's recognized for what it is a jellyfish but it's a jellyfish that always seems to have a friend in tow and we have no idea why there are two species of deepstaria jellies and they don't look like jellyfish they lack the long stinging tentacles that are a hallmark of many jellies instead all you see is their bell which is very thin fragile and extremely oversized in comparison to other jellies measuring over half a meter wide to swim they actually ripple these huge delicate bells which is pretty unusual and may also contribute to their shape-shifting reputation but that's not where the weirdness ends deep staria jellies belong to the almara d family one of the most ancient lineages of jellyfish you're familiar with the moon jelly they're also a member of this family elmira d jellies are cousins with another order of jellies the rhizostomy and some of these aren't any more familiar looking either some rhizostomy have ditched tentacles altogether rather than tentacles these jellies catch and eat their prey using oral arms specialized appendages that help them catch food and move it to their mouths and it turns out we also see oral arms in deep sea species of omara d then instead of tentacles they dot their bells with stinging cells instead this may be a more useful strategy than tentacles for catching hard to find prey in the deep sea and might help explain why deepstaria is missing them researchers believe that deepstaria jellies are ambush predators lying in wait with their bodies spread out wide until some unfortunate creature swims into them then they close their bell around the prey and cinch themselves up tight like a trash bag and nothing escapes the inside of a deep starria jelly alive except one creature almost every deep starry a jellyfish encountered in the deep sea has a little friend living inside of it the giant isopod and europas picture your typical garden pill bug and then supersize it they can get several centimeters long and scientists aren't quite sure who benefits from this relationship and how specifically they don't know if the jelly gets anything from this nor do they know whether the isopod is doing any harm or just along for the ride they do know that these isopods are great at finding large jellies like deepstaria and then settling in for the long haul but there's still a lot left to learn about these weird deep-sea critters like how do they meet up to reproduce why are they so hard to find and why are they so appealing to those isopods but now that you know about these awesome jellies you'll never mistake one for a trash bag at least once you spot its little hitchhiker thanks for watching this episode of scishow if you enjoyed these episodes we've got plenty of ocean content where this came from including a few episodes made in partnership with the folks at monterey bay aquarium if you want to watch one after this you might try our extremely cute episode about animals that adopt [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 438,862

Rating: 4.9170985 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, Bizarre Creatures of the Deep Sea, michael aranda, deep sea, deep ocean, biology, black swallower, dragonfish, deepstaria, riftia pachyptila, loriciferan

Id: hths6CDM1F4

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020