Quick facts: a jellyfish the length of a school bus. Bones from Argentina's first confirmed deep-sea whale fall. A coral colony nearly the size of Vatican City. All found on the same expedition.
A jellyfish nearly the length of a school bus turned up alongside Argentina's first confirmed deep-sea whale fall — on an expedition looking for neither.
Researchers aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute's Falkor (too) set out to study cold seeps, spots on the seafloor where methane quietly leaks out and feeds entire food chains built on chemistry instead of sunlight. They found only one active seep. What they found instead was everything living around it.
The giant phantom jelly, Stygiomedusa gigantea, is one of the largest animals in the ocean and one of the least observed alive. Its bell alone can stretch a metre wide, with arms trailing up to 10 metres behind it. It has no stinging tentacles. It simply drapes its arms over prey and holds on.
Argentina's First Whale Fall
Nearby, at roughly 2.4 miles down, the team found Argentina's first confirmed whale fall: the skeleton of a whale that sank to the seafloor and is now, slowly, feeding an entire community of scavengers that may not exist anywhere else. Around it, researchers counted what they believe are 28 species new to science, living inside the largest known coral reef of its kind on the planet.
Nobody set out to find any of this. That's sort of the point.
Image credit: A real deep-sea whale fall community on the seafloor