Video transcript
The video is 7 minutes and 24 seconds long.
Produced by the American Museum of Natural History, April 2006.
Visual: Underwater footage of jellies.
Speaker: Bruce Robison, Senior Scientist, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Jellies are really intriguing for lots of reasons. In many respects, they're really beautiful animals, the iridescence of ctenophores and the beautiful color patterns of the muscle tissue of some jellies have rainbow colors, and they can be extraordinarily pretty.
Jellies also are perfectly adapted to a three-dimensional watery habitat. They can achieve remarkable sizes and some extraordinary shapes that allow them to function very differently than animals in any other habitat on Earth.
Visual: Title graphic "Jellies Down Deep"
Speaker: Bruce Robison
Back in the days when we sampled the deep sea by dragging nets behind ships, we thought that the principal components of the deep-sea communities were fish and squids and shrimps, animals that had hard bodies.
Until very recently, we didn't appreciate that gelatinous animals comprise as much as 30, maybe 40 percent of the biomass in the deep-sea water column.
Visual: Scientists preparing an underwater remotely-operated vehicle dive. Footage of boats, water, and the vehicle.
Speaker: Kevin Raskoff, California State University, Monterey Bay
One of the reasons that we have been learning so much about jellyfish recently ― in the last several decades ― is basically because of the instrument that's behind me right now.
Robotic submarines, person submersibles, various sorts of specialized deep-diving equipment that allow us to take ourselves, or to take our eyes in the form of a video signal, down into the water and see what these animals are actually doing down there.
Visual: Boat in the open water. After some final checks by scientists, the Ventana vehicle is lifted by crane from the boat to the water to initiate the dive.
The Ventana has been a really workhorse ROV [Remotely Operated Vehicle] for us. We've had that for upwards of about 15 years now.
It just celebrated its 2,500th dive, which makes it the most used ROV on the planet.
It has probably done more scientific dives than all other scientific ROVs combined, so it is truly a superstar in terms of deep-sea research.
Visual: Control room, with computer monitors showing the state of the submersible. Scientists in chairs with headsets watch the monitors and video feeds, noting details on paper.
Speaker: Bruce Robison and others in control room.
O.K.
Heading down…
3-2-1 Begin transect.
1,000 meters…
Oxygen is 0.38
Speaker: Bruce Robison
The kinds of work that we do on the Ventana fall into two or three categories.
One of the most important things that we can do is to build a quantitative time series of information about the numbers and kinds of jellies in Monterey Bay over time. You know that we’re seeing
Dosidicus year-round.
Speaker: Bruce Robison in control room.
Is there any history of that in the past that was sort of year-round? Certainly not in our records.
Visual: Control room monitor showing close-up of jelly underwater.
Speaker: Bruce Robison
We also spend a lot of time using Ventana and its high definition video camera to watch behavior patterns.
Speaker: Bruce Robison in control room
Well, they often feed on detritus that settles out on the hairs on their long legs, and they’ll bring them across their mouth and scrape the food off like that.
Speaker: Bruce Robison
And finally, we use the ROV to collect animals.
One of the advantages of working on jellies is that they're blind and deaf, and they don't seem to mind at all when we fly up to them and zoom in with our lights and cameras and the whirring motors of the ROV.
In fact, most of the time they have no idea that they’ve been caught.
Visual: The Ventana captures a jelly in an trap held by the the vehicle.
Speaker: Bruce Robison in control room
Alright…bravo. Nice work. That was beautiful, way to go.
Speaker: Kevin Raskoff
Visual: Satellite image of the topology of the ocean offshore from Monterey Bay, California.
The wonderful thing about the operations we have here at MBARI is that we have a deep-water canyon that runs right off of shore, and so within an hour or two, we can be out into very deep water, which means that when we collect something from very deep water, we can be back to the lab within a few hours.
That's something that nobody else on the planet can do.
Visual: Scientist debark from the boat, review the state of the captured jellies, and wheel the specimens across the parking lot to the lab.
Speaker: Scientist
His tentacles are in great shape.
Visual: In the laboratory, the jelly is released into a study tank.
Speaker: Kevin Raskoff
When we get them back to the lab, what we do with them depends greatly on what we know about these animals.
And often, we are the first people that have ever seen these animals alive with our own eyes.
And so sometimes the very simplest of questions, like, what does it eat? Or how does it eat? Or does it reproduce? At what times?
Visual: Viewing the jellies through a microscope
Or very simple questions that you'd usually consider very fundamental naturalist questions that maybe a lot of people assume we already know about
everything on the planet, we have absolutely no idea about what these jellyfish do.
Speaker: Bruce Robison
Visual: Bruce seated. Footage of large jelly moving underwater.
While we know a lot about jellies, and are learning more at a pretty rapid pace, we’ve still only explored a tiny fraction of the deep ocean, and so we know relatively little about all the different kinds of jellies that are out there.
Visual: Varieties of jellies moving underwater.
So in terms of just discovering new kinds, there’s a huge amount to be learned.
And [our understanding of] the biodiversity of this planet will expand considerably once we are
able to catalog the deep-living jellies.
Speaker: Kevin Raskoff
The deep sea is a big place.
Of the available space for an animal or a plant to live, on the Earth, over 95 percent of the Earth
is actually the deep sea.
Visual: The research boat again, in open water, raising the Ventana
MBARI, in Monterey Bay, has studied maybe 1 percent of this bay, and it is by far the best studied
deep-sea environment on the planet. And so we have little tiny dots of information. But we don't have large coverage. We don't have good information for large areas of the planet.
This is true for jellyfish. And everything else.
Visual: Control room and jellies on monitors.
Speaker: Bruce Robison
When we're flying the Ventana down deep into the Monterey Canyon, I'm always hoping for something I can't expect, the one thing that is going to knock my socks off because it surprises me.
That's part of the fun of exploration, is that you know that you're going to find new things, but you can't predict what they're going to be.
Speaker: Bruce and others in the control room
What’s that?
Oh it’s a squid…
This is somebody new!…Whoa!
It’s really white.
We’ve never seen this guy before.
Wow!