Pilot. Dive super.
Dive super, pilot.
Ready to dive?
Pilot is ready.
Going down.
50 meters and hold, please.
Yeah, let him go.
Did quite a lot last cruise, was helped by letting the co-pilot take the camera.
Yeah, I’m starting to think that would help.
My name is Amanda Demopoulos, I’m from the USGS, I’m here with Martha Nizinski on the Okeanos Explorer.
So anyone who’s watching the live feed from the shore side, this is a very exciting dive today.
This is the first time we’ve ever explored this area, Mytilus Seamount,
and as you see it, we’re seeing it for the first time,
so we’re thrilled to be on this adventure with you all and look forward to what we’re going to discover as we ascend.
Nice.
Thanks, pilot.
Seeing some amphipods on the inside of this sponge.
Looks like sort of fibrous threads along the inside of the sponge.
Some close ups of a crinoid that’s on a branch of what looks like a bamboo coral.
Amphipods on this Chrysogorgia.
These rocks are basalt.
Couple different shapes and sizes here.
How are we for distance, co-pilot?
We set and we’re coming out, we’ll get the lasers for scale.
Little pycnogonid on one of the branches.
Another species for the diversity list.
Whatever that was, it had us flummoxed and it was very exciting and that was great imaging, thank you.
Thank you.
Genus of bamboo named by…
Roger that. We’ll have nav work that up.
Let’s find something we haven’t seen before.
We are diving today on the north side of Mytilus Seamount.
Lydonia Canyon.
We’re at Nygren Canyon on the west side of the canyon wall.
Southwest wall of Heezen Canyon.
Diving on USGS Hazards Site 1 with the purpose to investigate small, perhaps recent, landslide debris deposits.
Ooooh!
More deep-sea predation.
Ooooh!
That was a swordfish!
Wow!
That’s so awesome!
Oh my goodness.
That’s really interesting, to be able to see these mating pairs eating.
You can see the barbel extended from the mouth.
Stomias is a mid-water fish.
That coral has the fish.
He’s moving in for his close up.
We’re taking some images of a fish, I think a rattail.
Looks like a shark.
So definitely a stalked crinoid that we’re taking a look at now.
We’re getting some nice images of this bamboo coral, probably in the genus Lepidisis.
Our depth is 1,551 meters.
So those are scale worms crawling along the branch of the black coral.
Bridge, nav.
Whoa!
My goodness.
That is cool.
That’s awesome.
What is it, Scott, do you think?
I have never seen anything like that before.
Suggestions are that perhaps this is made by a nudibranch, but we haven’t seen any nudibranchs.
We have just seen something incredibly amazing and it has stumped all of our resident experts.
I think the polyps on this are retracted.
And really, for those of you who are just joining us, maybe for the first time,
you have tuned in at just the right time because we’ve just been seeing just fantastic colonies of corals here.
Imagine you want a point here. I’ve already marked it, but would you like an official point?
Let’s call it the Coral Forest.
Coral Forest.
My records show that this is the first official target of the dive.
Yes, I believe that’s true.
Alright. You got it. The Coral Forest.
Thank you.
It’s only through exploration like this that we can get these views to really understand
how these corals are distributed and how they’re using this habitat.
I count three egg cases.
You see one on each branch, kind of on the tip, they’re sort of this brown color.
You can see the ophiuroid arms kind of coiled around the egg case.
You can see the polyps close up as the shrimp is walking across the coral.
So happy with that science? Alright, let’s continue.
Know that pretty coral is waiting for us around the next corner.
So we’re seeing the arms of several brittle stars that are using this Acanthogorgia as a home.
So that coral represents a new family that we haven’t been observing on this leg.
That may be a species in a new family that we’ve had a few other specimens look similar to that that were collected in the Gulf of Mexico.
So again with all the exploration that we’re doing, we continue to find new species for science.
This is Martha Nizinski and Amanda Demopoulos and we’re helping guide your trip through the canyon today.
So we’ll continue moving up this feature, taking a look to discover and document the different kinds of animals that we’re seeing.
We’ve seen some extremely interesting corals today as well as a high diversity of sponges.
Our current depth is 2,820 meters.
Salps are filter-feeding, gelatinous organisms and what we’re looking at here are
chains where there are lots of individuals linked together and form a colony
and they can break apart and take up a solitary existence
but they’re constantly swimming and filtering particles out of the water.
It’s nice to have the resources out on the shore of a variety of experts
in all different places that can be with us today on this dive and help with identifications.
I think we’re seeing a seep here!
I think we’re seeing a seep.
How exciting!
Wow.
Whoa.
A true exploration, right here.
This is definitely a day anything can happen, it seems like.
We didn’t know exactly what we would find and we came upon this habitat as pure surprise,
and that’s truly exciting…it’s exploration in action.
We’re adventuring into wonderland at the moment.
This is brave new territory.
Well, it was a surprise that we came upon this seep with associated organisms.
During this year we’ve actually made some great progress in identifying several new seeps along the northeast U.S.
and it gives us a better understanding of how connected these communities are along a seascape perspective.
Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll.
10,000 fleets have sailed thee in vain.
Man’s control stops with the shore.
All the wrecks, all the wrecks upon thee are thy deed.
Something like that. I got some words out of order.
What is that from, Jeff? I never heard that.
Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll?
By who?
Byron.
A ctenophore inside another.
That’s a great shot, video and pilot.
More predation in the deep sea.
Beautiful images of the siphonophore.
This species has two lines of suckers on the arms.
Imaging a bobtail squid.
Just seeing the colors change.
Each of those spots is a little bag of melanin.
And it’s controlled by radial muscles around it, so when it contracts the muscles,
it expands the little bag of pigment, which makes the spot get bigger.
So, when it’s relaxed, the spot gets really small and difficult to see.
There’s an octopus up in that small cave.
It looks like it’s hanging on there.
We saw one in this position a little bit earlier today with its suckers showing out from underneath the ledge.
Wow.
Looks like some battle scars on that thing.
There’s speculation that it might be a Greenland shark.
Greenland shark?
Yes.
Ah. There’s another skate.
Oh, a squid. Uh-oh.
Ooo. Pretty.
Bob Carney has suggested that this is an ammonite fossil in a mudstone matrix.
The rocks would have to be Cretaceous for that to be true.
But that’s certainly what it looks like.
Wow.
It’s a toadfish.
So we have seen this fish in a few of the other canyons.
Pretty amazing morphology to these walls, just phenomenal in some ways that that’s the structures they are.
This whole outcrop may not in fact be in place.
There are enormous slumps associated with these in canyons, so some of these rocks may actually,
the rocks we view in the ROV may all be displaced and moving downslope.
Good view of what look to be downslope, probably sediment-laden, fluid chutes.
This is what would happen if a turbidity current, a sediment-laden, a dense current came down the slope that you’re looking at,
they would tend to follow these cross upslope, downslope features.
Wow.
A nudibranch.
Your purple blob is Tritonia, probably a new species. A nudibranch.
Wow!
A new species!
I just wanted to convey the amazement of seeing the first nudibranch that I’ve seen on this entire cruise.
Appears to be an egg mass.
Andrea Quattrini’s saying that perhaps these are fish eggs.
It’s a hydroid.
That’s wild.
Beautiful.
I don’t think we’ve seen a swarm of amphipods on our travels.
Extending its jaws and scooping. Scooping around.
This is a good close-up view of a pycnogonid, a sea spider.
Tongue fish.
So that’s three tongue fish on this dive.
Look, he crawls instead of swims.
Yeah, look at that.
Often on terrain like this, where it’s muddy and flat, we can touch the vehicles down on the bottom ever so gently to get a more stable picture.
Wow.
This kind of worm could really give worms a better image.
A large anemone there.
And there’s a bivalve at the base.
We’re seeing clear, dark rock colonized, encrusted with all of these different animals.
There’s a colony coming up here. Let’s see what that’s all about.
Corals aged there are several hundreds years old, is a conservative estimate, at best.
That is quite an impressive base now that we’re even closer.
We need to finish this shot.
It’s amazing that we always seem to end our dives with just a fabulous image.
One of these spectacular corals or other organisms that we’ve been viewing.
Thank you, ROV team and video for all your help today in making this another successful dive.
We’re leaving the bottom at a depth of 1,621 meters.
This is Martha Nizinski, here with Amanda Demopoulos, and we thank you for joining us today as we’ve been able to explore.
This was one dive along one single area in a vast area of the canyon.
That really only gives us a small picture of what may remain.
So, stay tuned on your must-see Deep Sea TV.
And now we’re just going to have to come up.
Do we have to?
Sorry, we have to. But tell you what, we’ll do it again tomorrow.
Alright.
Promise?
We’ll hold you to that.
Promise.