“Oh what is that? I actually have no idea.”
Scientists can be heard discussing a bright purple blob on the video released by Nautilus Live this month, and they seem completely stumped. The crew of the E/V Nautilus operated by Ocean Exploration Trust have stumbled upon a potentially new, unknown species while exploring undersea rock crevices near the Channel Islands, not so far off the coast of Los Angeles.
In an unscripted undersea drama, the crew tries to measure and collect the purple ball with a hose while a curious crab comes over to take a look. The crew manning the ROV (remote operated vehicle) uses a slurping hose to suck up the orb so they can give it a better inspection. The ball is only about 2 inches wide but very peculiar—looking like either an egg sac or an animal.
Even after the scientists get it to the surface they are still unclear exactly what they are looking at. They hypothesize it is a pleurobranch, a relative of nudibranchs, which are colorful soft bodied marine mollusks. Marine invertebrate expert Sebastian Kvist, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, agrees with the crew’s preliminary identification of pleurobranch: “If it is a pleurobranch then it’s almost certainly at least a new species.”
While it may take a while for the orb to be officially identified and described as a new species, there are no shortage of new discoveries to make in the deep sea. “The deep sea remains one of the most unexplored ecosystems in the world and, if you forgive the pun, we have only scratched the surface of the diversity found in the oceans in general and deep oceans in particular,” Kvist says.
