29th January 2010, 11:02 AM
Location: East Scotia Ridge (56°S, 30°W)

One of the most exciting things about working in the deep ocean is finding new species of marine life that no one has ever seen before.
 
Unfortunately we can’t share details here of the animals that we’re finding at the vents, because our discoveries have to be checked by other scientists before they can be made public.  But away from the vents we have seen lots of other kinds of deep-sea creatures, which we can show here.

This is one of my favourite deep-sea animals: a comb jelly, or ctenophore (pronounced teeno-four). They look a bit like jellyfish, but they actually belong to a completely different group of animals.  I think they are one of the most “alien-looking” inhabitants of the deep ocean.	Comb jellies swim using rows of tiny paddles – called combs – that run in lines around their bodies.  These combs catch our lights shining on them to produce beautiful rivers of colour that shoot across the animal’s body, which you can just see in one of our photographs.
Away from hydrothermal vents, food is usually scarce in the deep ocean.  Some animals make a meal out of the organic matter than sinks from shallow water to coat the seafloor like snow.  The sea cucumber – a relative of the starfish, and not a cucumber at all – is one of those animals, and feeds by ploughing its way across the seafloor, extracting what nutrition it can from those sediments.	Another animal that feeds in a similar way is the enteropneust.  These are very mysterious creatures – not many species are known, and the one in the photograph here could quite possibly be new.  But so far we haven’t collected a specimen to examine, so we can’t say for sure yet.  And I'll admit this isn't a great photo - we only caught a glimpse of this one in passing.  But you can often tell when an enteropneust has been about, because they leave a distinctive trail of droppings behind them as they eat their way across the seafloor.
Unlike the sea cucumber and enteropneust, deep-sea anemones sit still and use their tentacles to catch their food.  They are animals, not plants - we are far beyond the reach of sunlight here, so no plants can survive at these depths.  Their tentacles are armed with stinging cells that paralyse their passing prey, which then gets pulled into the animal’s mouth, where all the tentacles meet.  Nicolai felt an anemone sting him through his lab gloves during this trip – but it only tingled a bit and did not hurt.