For scientists, the deep ocean remains one of the unexplored frontiers of the planet,
but as technology develops, allowing experts to venture deeper in our oceans,
they've uncovered life that looks more like sci-fi than anything known elsewhere in nature.
And this week on EcoSolutions, we speak to a conservationist
who has documented strange deep sea creatures in a book called The Deep.
The inspiration behind the book The Deep that I wrote is really clear, 'cause it was just, it happened on one day,
and that was when I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California,
and it...which, to my standards, [is] the most beautiful aquarium in the world.
My life just completely changed afterwards.
I flew back, and all I could see were images of these creatures on my mind,
and I just wanted to go home and tell everyone, tell the whole world!
I felt like we had been looking for alien life on other planets for so long, and I felt we were wrong, you know.
Alien life is exactly here. It's on this planet, but it's just in the deep ocean.
So, I felt I needed to share my excitement and the wonder.
I remember the most exciting part of making the book was opening my email in the morning.
Every morning I was like jumping out of bed like I have never jumped out of bed before
because I just wanted to rush to my email.
And basically every night it was somebody sending some just stunning creature.
Some of them had no names, you know, because they had never been caught.
I must say I've got a soft point [spot] for invertebrates -- you know, so, animals without a backbone,
you know, deep sea finned octopus, those that we call Dumbo octopuses.
And they're pink or orangey, and they've got big fins, but they look like big ears,
so that's why we call them Dumbos.
So, when you go down with the submersible, you go through the water column,
and if you turn your lights off...you disturb all these animals, right, and so they all emit light.
So, you know, you look through the porthole, and it's much better than watching the sky.
You know, it's much better 'cause there's so much going on. It's not static at all.
Some light is just very, very instantaneous, sort of clicks or flashes,
and others is [are] just continuous, sort of strings of light that disappear in the distance.
Yeah, it's spectacular, spectacular.
2010 is the year for biodiversity, and conservationists,
as the public, the public is aware already, is [are] really worried about the deep ocean's fate,
because the destruction that we're doing with, you know, with deep sea bottom trawling, fishing these fish,
is much faster and at a much larger scale than any other destruction that's ever occurred on this planet.
They go across the sea floor and they just take everything,
so it's [a] very indiscriminant way of fishing, very unselective and very destructive.
But you have to think of the deep ocean as something that is vanishing,
and only for the markets, the profit of catching a few fish that end up on our plate.