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For scientists, the deep ocean remains one of the unexplored frontiers of the planet,

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but as technology develops, allowing experts to venture deeper in our oceans,

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they've uncovered life that looks more like sci-fi than anything known elsewhere in nature.

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And this week on EcoSolutions, we speak to a conservationist

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who has documented strange deep sea creatures in a book called The Deep.

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The inspiration behind the book The Deep that I wrote is really clear, 'cause it was just, it happened on one day,

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and that was when I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California,

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and it...which, to my standards, [is] the most beautiful aquarium in the world.

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My life just completely changed afterwards.

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I flew back, and all I could see were images of these creatures on my mind,

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and I just wanted to go home and tell everyone, tell the whole world! 

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I felt like we had been looking for alien life on other planets for so long, and I felt we were wrong, you know.

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Alien life is exactly here. It's on this planet, but it's just in the deep ocean.

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So, I felt I needed to share my excitement and the wonder.

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I remember the most exciting part of making the book was opening my email in the morning.

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Every morning I was like jumping out of bed like I have never jumped out of bed before

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because I just wanted to rush to my email.

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And basically every night it was somebody sending some just stunning creature.

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Some of them had no names, you know, because they had never been caught.

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I must say I've got a soft point [spot] for invertebrates -- you know, so, animals without a backbone,

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you know, deep sea finned octopus, those that we call Dumbo octopuses.

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And they're pink or orangey, and they've got big fins, but they look like big ears,

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so that's why we call them Dumbos.

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So, when you go down with the submersible, you go through the water column,

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and if you turn your lights off...you disturb all these animals, right, and so they all emit light.

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So, you know, you look through the porthole, and it's much better than watching the sky.

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You know, it's much better 'cause there's so much going on. It's not static at all.

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Some light is just very, very instantaneous, sort of clicks or flashes,

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and others is [are] just continuous, sort of strings of light that disappear in the distance.

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Yeah, it's spectacular, spectacular.

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2010 is the year for biodiversity, and conservationists,

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as the public, the public is aware already, is [are] really worried about the deep ocean's fate,

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because the destruction that we're doing with, you know, with deep sea bottom trawling, fishing these fish,

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is much faster and at a much larger scale than any other destruction that's ever occurred on this planet.

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They go across the sea floor and they just take everything,

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so it's [a] very indiscriminant way of fishing, very unselective and very destructive.

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But you have to think of the deep ocean as something that is vanishing,

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and only for the markets, the profit of catching a few fish that end up on our plate.