Schmidt Ocean Institute Research Team Discovers 31 New Species
An international team of midwater experts on board Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor (too) discovered over two dozen new marine species on a recent expedition off the coast of Brazil in the tropical South Atlantic Ocean. The scientists used advanced technologies to explore the Ocean’s midwater — the water between the sunlit layer and the seafloor — which is Earth’s largest and least explored habitable ecosystem. It can take scientists decades to identify and describe new species, but the combination of technology and expertise enabled the team to confirm these species as new within a matter of days.
The list consists of an amphipod, a type of crustacean related to crabs and lobsters; a gossamer worm that moves faster than scientists expect it to based on its body shape; nine jellyfish; seven siphonophores, colonial organisms related to jellyfish and corals; seven comb jellies or ctenophores, famous for the glittering cilia they use to swim; four larvaceans, tadpole-like creatures that live in mucus houses and are more closely related to humans than invertebrates; and two giant rhizarians, single-celled organisms visible to the naked eye.
The team witnessed far more diversity and abundance of midwater organisms than they expected, said Osborn, including glass squid and a pelagic octopus feeding on a bright red jellyfish.
The Ocean’s midwater is one of the most challenging areas on Earth to explore because of its inaccessibility and immense volume. The Sasakawa Peace Foundation’s Ocean Shot Research Grant Program funded two midwater programs that made this work possible, one based at the University of Western Australia and the other at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, USA.
The technologies used to identify new species were a combination of imaging systems and genetic analyses.
The imaging systems included the DeepPIV (particle image velocimetry) and EyeRIS (remote imaging system) instruments, developed by the Bioinspiration Lab at MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute), which were attached to Schmidt Ocean Institute’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) SuBastian. DeepPIV and EyeRIS are sophisticated, non-invasive tools for scanning marine animals; they use lasers to scan organisms and create 3D images of them. In addition, the team attached a shadowgraph camera from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) to the ROV, which can image the finer details of animals not visible in the 3D scans. The images help scientists describe the shape and internal structures of animals without having to collect them.
Many midwater animals are gelatinous, with soft, delicate bodies that are often damaged by traditional sampling methods. To address this challenge, the expedition used additional technologies that allowed scientists to observe animals in a controlled environment that mimics their natural habitat. These included a virtual reality chamber developed at the University of Western Australia and a “gravity machine” developed at Stanford University — a specialized microscope that functions as a hydrodynamic treadmill for studying microbes.
The team used another microscope developed at Stanford University to gain critical new insights into the physiology of midwater animals. The microscope, known as Squid, is an open-source, confocal microscope. Using Squid, the team achieved a first for research at sea and imaged living internal cellular structures in 3D. One of the organisms imaged was a large single-celled microbe called a protist. The microscope enabled the scientists to observe how the protist’s cellular structure interacted with its glass skeleton.
In tandem with the high-resolution imagery, the team sequenced genomes from collected specimens onboard the vessel, enabling them to rapidly identify new species under the leadership of Dr. Cheryl Ames of Tohoku University and Dr. John Burns of Bigelow Laboratory.