The great depths of the world’s oceans are rightfully considered the last great white spot on Earth. The harsh environmental conditions in the deep sea world can only be compared to the hostile environment of outer space; Eternal black darkness, terrible pressure and near-zero degree extreme cold make the Abyssal Zone the most difficult world to explore in the terrestrial environment. The challenges of deep-sea research were aptly illustrated by Robert D. Ballard, the Titanic explorer, who once said that we know the far side of the Moon much better than the deep-ocean world. That is why it is no coincidence that dozens of species unknown to science from this kingdom are described every year, which are still unknown to us. A large part of these are creatures that stretch the boundaries of human imagination and evoke the world of science fiction movies, such as the amazing creature that even scientists weren’t sure what it really was.
It looked like an unknown ancient symbol as it appeared from the pitch darkness
It was recorded in 2013, exactly a decade ago Oceaneering United Kingdom The remote-controlled ROV launched from the research vessel of an organization engaged in deep sea research and technology work, took the special sequence of shots,
Which shows a strange creature like no other.
Oceaneering was operating off the coast of East Africa under contract to inspect a sunken oil rig drilling head.
To fulfill the request a Millennium Plus A remote-controlled deep-sea diving rig equipped with a camera and two manipulator arms deployed. The modern ROV features automatic steering and thrust control, which can dive to a maximum depth of 4,000 metres. In the late afternoon of March 13, 2013, Millennium reached the bottom of the Indian Ocean at a depth of 1,143 metres, near the test drill.
While making recordings to assess the condition of the equipment, it was quite strange,
Mostly a creature resembling some kind of ancient symbol drifted into the ROV’s headlight beam.
The strange creature first drifted with the current, then suddenly changed shape and inflated itself like a hose, while garlands of tiny colored dots of light flashed across its torso, as you can see in the video embedded below.
Then it began to jitter quickly and erratically, which may have been caused by the whirlpool generated by the rotating drill bit.
The recording posted on the social video-sharing site started a veritable tsunami of speculation among commentators, giving birth to more than fantastic ideas about the origin of the creature, but only marine biologists can provide a rational explanation for what this strange creature could actually be like. . .
They have been inhabiting the world’s oceans for nearly a billion years
When the Millennium ROV was published in 2014, even experts were initially scratching their heads trying to decipher the creature’s taxonomic identity. the Monterey Bay Aquarium Steve Haddock, a nettle expert from the Research Department (Monetrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Monetery, California, USA) came up with the solution: according to a marine biologist
The strange creature is a very ancient group of animals,
ribbed jellyfish (Ctenophora) may be one of its representatives unknown to science.
The ribbed jellyfish is the oldest group of tissue animals, the tribe appearing in the seas of the world during the Precambrian period, about 900 million years ago. According to paleontologists and evolutionary biologists, jellyfish are one of the simplest phyla in the animal world. They lived their heyday in the geological past, as three extinct classes are known,
But a testament to its extraordinary adaptability,
that from the perspective of nearly a billion years ago they are still represented by 180 species in the world’s sea.
They are very diverse in size, and mature individuals of some species are only a few millimeters long.
But there are also real giants among them, whose body length can reach one and a half meters.
At night, many of their species glow like deep-sea animals. On summer nights, it is common for an unnoticed jellyfish to “warm up” literally for a minute at the slightest stimulus.
The ribbed jellyfish lives exclusively in the sea, which are usually predators in the open seas, but there are also sessile species that live in a fixed place. Mostly the photosynthetic belt (the area from the surface to a water depth of 200 m, the so.), but there are also deep-sea species that live in the dark zone without light, the abyssal belt (from 1000 meters to the bottom of ocean trenches, so.) is alive, as is its very strange shape.
