29 ms·
Deep-sea vehicles spot 'alien' sharks deep beneath the waves in the Pacific
- MostlyStable 2mo agoThere 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.
- gr_norm 2mo agoWow! 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 2mo agoThere's so many kinds of microbe we don't have catalogued. The last 30-40 years have been pretty astonishing in that regard.
- hackable_sand 2mo agoConquered
- nkrisc 2mo agoI think we should be doing less conquering of the planet we live on.
- erikerikson 2mo agos/conquered/experienced/ Or s/conquered/discovered/ ...
- FabHK 2mo agoIndeed. Until around 2021 or so, more people had been to the moon than to the bottom of the ocean (Challenger Deep). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_Deep
- doodlebugging 2mo agoSometimes 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.
- __bb 2mo ago> 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 This (and the concept of extinction credits) is an opening plot point in the book “Venomous Lumpsucker”, which I found a good read.
- doodlebugging 2mo agoThank you for that recommendation! I read a lot and this sounds interesting.
- XorNot 2mo agoNo one is mining manganese from the sea floor. The whole idea was a CIA cover story for a mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine that the Americans knew the location of but the Soviets didn't. They needed an explanation for a cargo ship headed out to a specific area with deep sea construction equipment on board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
- juahan 2mo ago
- everyone 2mo agoCould the light be blinding all the animals? I would assume their eyes would have evolved to be extremely sensitive to light.
- mshockwave 2mo agoor have little vision to begin with
- nly 2mo agoThey can...swim away
- everyone 2mo agoPerhaps they may not have an instinct to protect themselves / swim away from blinding lights?
- dredmorbius 2mo agoAnd might well swim toward light (as with, say, moths, sans swimming).
- pvaldes 2mo agoProbably, most sharks have nictitating membranes to protect the eye, but this family of sharks didn't evolved one apparently. In any case, they can avoid easily the light source swimming away.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoYes, there is an issue with exploration lights effecting native life. Recent attempts to capture a giant squid on video were only realized when they switched the lights off.
- everyone 2mo agoCould they use very low light cameras? or perhaps lights and cameras that dont operate in the visual range?
- triyambakam 2mo ago> the animal leisurely glid along the sea floor Strange. I thought it was glided, or at least glode
- IAmGraydon 2mo agoIt is glided. "Glid" is not a word in the English language.
- virtualwhys 2mo agoStrange, I've always used glid, glided is so cumbersome in comparison.
- perpetuallunch 2mo agoYeah nah. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/yeah-nah_adv https://www.oed.com/dictionary/yeah-nah_adv
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glid https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glid They are synonyms
- mr_toad 2mo agoGlid vs glided, slid vs slided are examples of the inconsistency of the English language. Glided is more common than glid, and slid is more common than slided. Linguistics says that that makes slide an ‘irregular’ verb, but that’s basically a circular definition.
- Razengan 2mo agoOh fuck, we're gonna kill them too now aren't we
- jdthedisciple 2mo agoWe gotta know what's in it for us
- contingencies 2mo ago1. Sashimi goblinu 2. Goblin penis soup.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- rf15 2mo agome before opening: is this just going to be goblin sharks the article: Goblin sharks have never before been filmed in their natural habitat Surprisingly bad headline.
- gyomu 2mo agoLLMs are obsessed with hidden, never seen before goblins - I suspect this is why this story has been doing so well. https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/ https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
- paradoxyl 2mo agoyeah, calling these sharks who are native to our world 'alien' is kinda off-putting and obviously click-baity.
- KevinMS 2mo agoThey didn't explain it in the article but some people claim the creature from "Alien" was inspired by these sharks.
- donatj 2mo agoIt took me longer to get past the "human verification" than to read the entire article. Odd state of the world.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ajsnigrutin 2mo agoAt least it didn't show the "give us your email to subscribe to our spam" the moment you scroll a milimeter down the page. I started subscribing "admin@theirdomain.com" every time i get a popup like that... maybe i should start using some regulator (fcc,..) email instead.
- dredmorbius 2mo agoI prefer "ceo" or "sales", in those cases.
- anoplus 2mo agoThis kind of posts make me think. We all love technology because it's so cool, but how cool is nature already? Making our lives awesome is as much about protecting and discovering the sources for our inspiration, as building the stuff we are inspired to build.
- dandaka 2mo agoThere is not much we can do/build with nature. Even if everyone would take idea of "protection/inspiration", there are not many sustainable business models towards that direction. Nature is more aligned with inward observation / meditation, which is more aligned with Eastern tradition.
- itintheory 2mo agoWe sure can do things with nature. for instance, sustain any and all life on our planet. Viewing the natural world purely in an extractive mindset is the very reason we're in the dire mess we're in today.
- dandaka 2mo agoWhenever I have this choice "destroy or sustain any and all life", I always pick "sustain". Problem is, I don't often meet such an option to choose. Maybe your life is different.
- the_real_cher 2mo agoSaying Nature is not good as a "business model" is such an unintentionally funny Hacker News culture comment.
- altmanaltman 2mo agoI am sorry but why are you assuming "nature" cares? We benefit from the climate which allowed us to prosper and evolve but there have been periods of time on earth where nature was absolutely inhospitable to life. We just want to keep nature the way it works best for us but that is not protection.
- RoundingError1 2mo agoVery interesting. It's always fascinating how much we still don't know about this marble.
- terrycody 2mo agoThe BGM of the video is so stunning and "alien", who knows it name plz?