All the news on the Earth's largest environment.

Biologists have a habit of naming things after cool animals. Cars named after comb jellies, internet passwords after giant squid. Most of these names I recognized, but then I saw my friend’s wifi ...

Magnapinna squids are one of the deep-sea more ethereal creatures. Little is known of these squid as very few have ever been captured, although over the last decade with the increased usage of ...

Solar eclipse. From Wikimedia commons. On July 20th, 1963, three scientists sat on a research ship 200 miles south of Woods Hole, MA, waiting for something remarkable. They were nearly 4000m above the ...

A new species of deep-sea cucumber has over 100 feet in alternating two or three rows. This means of course that when it plays the This Little Piggy nursery rhyme it needs to repeat it 25 times. The ...

Ladies and gentlemen, I could not make this up if I tried. I owe my thanks to Wyatt Patry for sharing this study with me, and to P. Zelda Montoya and Barrett L. Christie at the The Dallas Zoo and ...

Osedax worms, or the ‘bone eating’ worms are little soft sacks resembling snotty little flowers. The “bone devourer” is not quite accurate as the worms do not actually feed on the bone mineral, but ...

A comment on Reddit reminded me of a question that I have received many times. The question is always a good one because it stems from knowledge and deductive reasoning. The said question requires one ...

You will never see the Ninja Lanternshark coming, not because it’s dark and elusive, but because you won’t be swimming below 1,000 feet deep off the coast of Central America any time soon. The ...

Here’s a mystery: below 8,400 meters there are no fish. There are other creatures: sea cucumbers, anemones, tiny worms, but no one has ever seen a fish. At 8,370 meters? There are fish. But not below ...

Like most deep-sea biologists, I have a large collection of decorated Styrofoam cups. A couple dozen line the bookshelf of my office, each displaying a rainbow of Sharpie colors. Each cup is ...

Readers of DSN may think they know my favorite organism. Did you guess the giant isopod or did you guess the giant squid? Those beasties are truly fantastic. Large and dwelling in the deep oceans, ...