Today as I predicted, lots and lots of starfish action.
These are called slime stars because these are able to project mucus out as a defense
mechanism.
Years ago this one was collected by the Pisces five submersible.
And brought up and I was physically examining it and it produced a prolific amount of slime
while I was doing so.
There is just a lovely picture of it that I have floating around twitter someplace.
We don't really know a lot about hymenaster, but they occur all around the world from the
arctic to the antarctic.
Mostly in cold water habitats.
This is Chris Mah and I'm a researcher at the National Museum of natural history in
the invertebrate zoology department.
I'm currently aboard the Okeanos Explorer which is seven hundred and ten nautical miles
southwest of Honolulu.
My expertise is actually in sea stars, I study sea stars and their relatives.
And I've actually described a good number of the species that we are seeing.
I've only seen many of these animals as dead white specimens in a drawer at the natural
history museum in Washington DC or at other museums all around the world, and to see one
alive to see it's original color is quite a revelation.
Oh that's lovely.
This is gilbertaster.
The first time it was recorded from the Hawaiian Islands it was in nineteen oh six.
I've seen maybe one or two of these and now I'm actually seeing one alive.
I'm almost brought to tears.
I've never seen this alive before.
And it really is just as beautiful as I thought it would be.
It's my old friend.
It is, I think I even know what this one is.
At one point this was thought to be one of the rarest sea stars known until we started
to see them all over the deep sea.
This is called hymenaster, they are simply bizarre.
We're looking at the arm tip, and those are all of the tube feet that are emanating from
the tip.
And those are usually used to help sense where the animal is going.
They have this bizarre surface texture which is kindof filled with all of these big puffy
ridges.
These are related to slime stars but other than that they are really kind of poorly known.
They are a mystery, there are the sea stars from the jurassic that are vaguely similar
to these, so there's just a lot bizarre things about them.
Very strange kind of animal.
We are exploring the deep ocean because of the numerous important aspects that are found
at this depth.
So from the biology perspective there are many undescribed species which live at this
depth.
Things that are potentially important to humans.
Some of the new species may harbor new secrets that might inspire industry, but also are
important for fisheries and other conservation measures.
Looks very much like hippasteria muscipula which is a species I described a few years
ago.
Predatory on bamboo corals before.
Looks like they might actually now feed on Hexacorallia.
Yeah, see some of the damage.
I bet that's post star fish eating damage.
Some nice views of the pedicellaria though.
There's our claw shaped structures that are on the underside.
I've never been able to figure out what they use them for.
But in a lot of ways this is just as valuable as discovering a new species, discovering
what some of these structures do.
These have been observed on sea stars since they were described.
In some cases, the seventeen hundreds or so.
Noone really knows what they do exactly.
A Choriaster perched on top of a stalk like that.
It's almost like.
Looks like a plump chicken on a stick to me.
I didn't even think of that until you said that.
You're never going to see that as a starfish again.
It's a whole chicken.
But this is a novel ecological observation, to me that's really amazing.
The chicken star.
No we are not calling it that.
Not calling it that.
This is our final dive of Laulima O Ka Moana which is the title of our cruise: Partnerships
in the sea.
I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to cohost Okeanos Explorer again.
But it's been a delightful two and a half weeks.
Two and a half weeks?
It's been more than that-three weeks?.
I've been at sea for a month.