WEBVTT

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Right now we are within the boundaries of the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa.

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And they've granted us permissions to make observations and collect here.

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There is a network of marine protected areas in American Samoa.

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Together, they comprise an area of 13,580 miles of protected marine ecosystems.

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This place where we are diving today, in Rose Atoll, is the southernmost territory of the United States.

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As far as we know, this is the first time that this part of the atoll has ever been observed.

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One of the main goals of this dive is to characterize deepwater coral communities that will help management of the Monument.

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This dive offers an important comparison between deepwater and shallow water communities.

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Look at the appendages in the center of the animal, they're moving quite a lot.

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He's sticking the tentacles in those holes.

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He's beautifully translucent.

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Wow.

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What a beautiful animal.

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The front part of the pectoral fins, those fan-shaped fins on the side, have thickened rays

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and this fish actually uses those to walk around on the bottom.

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So those things you see under the fish, that are like little thin legs, are actually part of the fin.

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They're really interesting fish with a lot of unusual morphological features.

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Look at that close up. Oh!

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Look at it!

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So does it attract prey like this, Santiago?

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Yeah. So the tentacles of this anemone have stinging cells, nematocysts,

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that have microscopic harpoons that inject venom.

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Wow. This is a big sponge.

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This is really quite unusual. It's probably going to be a brand new species, quite frankly.

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Many of the species that we see here, we can be pretty confident that they are likely to be new species.

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And that's because this is an area of the world we know very, very little about.

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All of the expeditions that are going to happen this year on the Okeanos Explorer

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are part of a larger initiative, called CAPSTONE,

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which is a multi-year campaign to collect deepwater baseline information

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that we hope will support management decisions in marine protected areas in

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United States territories as well as other territories in the western and central Pacific.

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So what role does this area play in the bigger biogeographical puzzle of life at the seafloor.