Mark Hayward Is My Hero

Really gorgeous. Watch the whole thing if you can muster up the patience.

The deep sea continues to be an amazing place full of surprises. A recent expedition to the New Hebrides deep-sea trench found an enexpected ecosystem and some awesome critters.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/4/5469016/new-hebrides-trench-explored-unexpected-eels-found

Tonight we finally get a chance to see the first-ever footage of a living Giant Squid.  It’s been almost a year since this one was caught by Japanese researchers off the Ogasawara islands, south of Tokyo.

AP Photo/Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Science Museum of Japan

The show airs twice tonight, at 8pm Eastern, and 12am.  See the listings for yourself.

photo: Kidjurel  from BloodyDecks.com

In doing a Google Image search for oarfish, I found a really great forum entry with some incredible oarfish photos.  Check it out here.

Super-awesome Sea spider. (I’m pretty sure that’s the Latin name)

photo: Paul H. Yancey Ph.D.

Sometimes it’s best to go straight to the source. I just found this page with a large number of very raw photos of deep sea critters. The site is from Paul H. Yancey Ph.D., who is a professor of Biology at Whitman College in Washington State. The pages are a little hard to read, but there are lots and lots of photos, especially of things that you don’t normally get to see like worms, sea spiders, and the cool weird stuff that I don’t know anything about.

I LOVE giant squids.  The show MonsterQuest on the History Channel just aired a show all about the quest for the giant squid.  It was pretty fun.  I don’t think I ever want to get in salt water again.  I’m not going to spoil the end for you, but I will say that they find some neat stuff.

The show airs again in 3 1/2 hours, Friday November 16th at 3am.

Over the weekend my wife and I went to a great craft fair in Pittsburgh called Handmade Arcade. One of the vendors that really caught my eye was a t-shirt printing joint called SquidFire out of Baltimore Maryland. They have a great, unusual take on deep-sea creatures, and they have all kinds of stuff with giant (or regular I suppose) squids all over it. There are other images besides sea creatures too….

As if Giant Squids weren’t cool enough, BEHOLD THE COLOSSAL SQUID!!! Larger than it cousin the giant squid, and believed to be nastier, this is the first living specimen ever caught, and the first to ever be captured on film. Of course it died in the capturing, but the footage should be incredibly valuable.

For more on Colossal Squids check out Wikipedia.

Japanese fisherman found a living deep-sea Frilled Shark this week. Although science did know about this shark before now, it has rarely been seen alive, and this has got to be the best video footage ever taken of the eel-like “living fossil”. Deep-sea creatures are so cool.

Video:

Or, check out the video here.

First of all, I love the ocean creatures. I’m not sure why, but sea life has always fascinated me, and deep-sea creatures have always been my favorites. The environment they live in is so extreme, and they tend to be FREAKY lookin’!

One of the few Oarfish ever seen surfaced at Santa Catalina Island, California on August 16th.

photo: VIMAS

This is not a picture of the actual fish, but I wanted you to see what these things look like. No one really knows the limit, but these fish can get enormous.

Also, three fisherman found some arms and a tentacle of a giant squid floating near Santa Cruz Island. We don’t get giant squid developments all that often, so this is pretty cool.