Ocean diving and exploring deep sea creatures, hydrothermal vents and deep sea jellyfish

The history of ocean exploration is a short one and when put into the context of human threats influencing the deep sea ecosystem many life forms will probably be eliminated before we discover them, its just the same as above the ocean surface. Just imagine this strange creatures who found a niche to live around hot vents, cold seeps, and whale falls.

There are huge deep sea jellyfish

and other monsters we probably haven't seen yet. Deep ocean life is totally unexplored I guess we know more about the Moon and the Mars as about the ocean floor. It somehow looks as a desert with large expanses of monotonous landscape devoid of life. Most panoramic photographs of the sea bottom are indeed reminiscent of deserts, with gently rolling contours of mud or sand and little visible life such as snails and squids, they are all deep sea animals.

Now (2012) a census of the deep ocean is underway. About 18.000 different impressive and surprising deep sea animals have been discovered so far, some deep sea monster and other deep sea animals. Life on earth is everywhere, in ice, in boiling sulfur springs, deserts and even on the edge of the atmosphere everywhere are living things and be it only some unicellular organisms evolved over millions of years have adapted to their environment such as this jellyfish and this other creature, some can be explored by ocean diving.

Some of the most fascinating visuals are pictures of ocean diving, its incredible what's down deep in the sea. One of the most strange creature down there is a angler fish, jellyfish and other deep sea animals. There are even sharks deep down there, considering the water pressure its somehow incredible how they can survive in the deep ocean. Deep sea water is incredible rich in other

A submersible to explore the deep ocean,

A submersible is often a unmanned marine robot with remote control operation through a mother ship where the control center is installed. Mostly this dive robot control center is installed in a container for easy moving. Today in almost all accidents in the ocean when aircraft crash into the water, ships have sunk, for exploration and hunting for sunken treasure submersible are used. They can be moved where people cant. Also at oil and gas exploration submersibles are common. In resent years a Russian submersible got good reputation, they slowly catching up with western technology. Since ocean diving with submersibles is very expensive they are usually used by big companies for oil and gas explorations or government funded research. One of the most resent use of a submersible was finding the flight data recorder of a Air France aircraft off Brazil.

A angler fish (video) is one of the real strange

deep sea creatures. One theory holds that the area may be species rich with because of small-scale patches created by events such as phytoplankton and ocean bacteria  blooms; the sinking of fish carcasses, pieces of wood, or seaweed; small-scale physical disturbances created by fish feeding; and polychaete fecal   mounds. These patches create microhabitats that certain species may be able to utilize better than other species.

The shifting mosaic of small-scale patches that occurs over the deep-sea floor may allow coexistence of all sorts of different species that would otherwise be competing for extremely limited food resources. In shallow water, physical events such as storms and tides tend to obliterate patches quickly so they cannot offer the same habitat heterogeneity as in deep-sea ecosystems. In 1989,

we conducted a series of experiments that were designed to determine whether different types of potential food patches in the deep sea would attract different organisms. A number of past studies show that pulses of organic matter attract a specialized fauna, but we 

reasoned that if small-scale patches were to serve as a mechanism for enhancing diversity, then different patch types would attract different species of organisms. Working south of St. Croix at 900 meters depth, we created artificial sediment patches that contained no organic material or that contained one of two different types of algae. And there are other such as transparent sea cucumber which rather looks like a alien from a other milky way system. We found that a type of seaweed (Sargassum sp.) attracted relatively low densities of a moderately diverse fauna over the 23 days of the ocean diving experiment, whereas a type of single-celled phytoplankton (Thalassiosira sp.) attracted extremely high densities of only a few species. The patches containing no organic matter attracted a fauna that differed from both algal treatments. The fauna in all of the artificial patches was quite different from the natural fauna in nearby undisturbed areas.

Additional experiments

conducted in 1991 demonstrated that patches attract different faunas as organic material in the patches ages. These deep sea creature experiments support the hypothesis that small-scale patches create microhabitats on which different species may specialize. Thus, it is the heterogeneity of a habitat once thought to be homogeneous that appears to be the key to its remarkable diversity. We anticipate that increased sampling of natural ephemeral patches will support the notion of a patch mosaic in the deep sea. But only time will tell - the deep sea continues to provide more and more surprises as  we are able to look more closely! Aspects of the deep sea research described have been supported by the National Undersea Research Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior. More detailed information on this work may be found in the February 1992 issue of American Naturalist in an article entitled "Deep-sea species richness: regional and local diversity estimates from quantitative bottom samples" by J. F. Grassle and N.J. Maciolek, and in the November 1992 issue of Limnology and Oceanography in an article entitled "The role of food patches in maintaining high deep-sea diversity: Field experiments with hydro dynamically unbiased colonization trays." by P.V. R. Snelgrove, J. F. Grassle, and R. F. Petrecca.