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pacific ocean

'Thrilling Discovery': Surprising Sea Creature Spotted in Pacific

'Thrilling Discovery': Surprising Sea Creature Spotted in Pacific

The sea pen made its appearance during a visit by a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, to an unexplored seamount near Johnston Atoll, a remote spot to the west of Hawaii in the Pacific. It was unexpected. This is the first time this animal has been spotted in the Pacific. It's normally found in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The Nautilus came across two examples during the dive.

A video shot at a depth of 9,823 feet (2,994 meters) shows the moment of discovery, along with commentary from excited researchers. "That looks wicked," says one of them after the ROV got a close-up shot of the creature's food-capturing tentacles. For scale, the sea pen's stalk is 6.6 feet (2 meters) long.

August 11, 2023
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Coral reefs host millions of bacteria, revealing Earth’s hidden biodiversity

Coral reefs host millions of bacteria, revealing Earth’s hidden biodiversity

Fish and corals in reefs across the Pacific Ocean may harbor nearly 3 million varieties of bacteria, researchers report June 1 in Nature Communications.

That means scientists are vastly underestimating Earth’s microbiome, microbiologist Pierre Galand of Sorbonne University in Paris said at a May 31 news conference. The new count of bacteria living in the Pacific Ocean’s coral reefs alone falls within current estimates for the total microbial diversity of Earth, suggesting that there exponentially more bacteria living on the planet than previously thought.

August 04, 2023
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