Over 60 per cent of our planet
is covered by ocean more than a mile deep.
That, the deep sea,
is by far the largest habitat on Earth
and it's largely unknown.
Join us on a journey
to the very bottom of the deep sea,
to an alien world never revealed before.
It's home to some of the strangest animals on Earth.
Fish flash in the darkness.
New species are discovered
on almost every dive.
More people have travelled into space
than have ventured this deep.
Come on a journey
into the abyss.
A sperm whale takes a breath,
its last for over an hour.
It's about to leave the warm, well—lit surface waters
and dive far down
into the cold, dark depths of the deep ocean.
At the surface
it took in air at the same pressure as we breath it.
But it's going to look for food
at more than 1,000 metres down,
where pressure is 100 times that on the surface,
crushing the whale's lungs
to just one per cent of their volume.
For us to follow the whale,
we need the very latest submersible.
A reinforced acrylic sphere
with walls 12 centimetres thick protects a pilot and our cameraman
from the enormous pressure below,
and allows the submarine to dive
to just over 900 metres.
(PILOT) 900 feet,
With every passing metre,
pressure increases
and sunlight diminishes.
(PILOT) 1,000 feet,
By 300 metres, it's already very dark
and the temperature of the water
is dropping fast.
We are entering the twilight zone,
a weird world of gloom
where many animals have become completely transparent.
In this twilight,
and animal needs to see,
and yet, as far as possible, must avoid being seen.
A giant amphipod,
12 centimetres long and almost perfectly transparent.
Its head is completely filled
by two huge eyes
with which it strains to detect its prey.
Another twilight monster, phronima,
the inspiration for the Alien movies.
She and her developing pink offspring
live like parasites in the stolen body of a jelly.
This impressive cutlery set
and its huge eyes
make phronima a powerful predator.
Even really complex animals
have become transparent in the twilight zone.
Squids are among the most advanced of invertebrates,
but this one never meets a hard surface in its entire life,
so its body need not be as robust as that of its shallow water cousins.
There's a rich variety of jellies
that live nowhere else but in the deep sea.
Thousands of tiny cilia propel them through a world without walls.
Invisible in the gloom,
they grope blindly for their prey.
Comb jellies let out long sticky nets to catch passing copepods.
But the most extensive death trap
is set by siphonophores.
This pulsating bell is the head of a colonial jelly
that can be 40 metres long.
Millions of tiny stinging cells
drifting through the sea.
500 metres down,
and in even the clearest tropical waters
only the faintest vestige of the sunlight remains —
so little that our eyes can't detect it, but others can.
Survival in the twilight zone
is all about seeing,
yet not being seen.
Hatchet fish
are masters of the game of hide and seek.
They have the large, sensitive eyes needed for seeking prey
but their bodies are flat...
and their sides are highly silvered.
Head on, they are just visible, thin though they are,
but as soon as they turn,
their mirrored sides
reflect the remnants of blue light from the surface,
and they disappear into the gloom.
Viewed from the side, whole shoals can hide in this way,
but what about from below?
The tubular eyes
of many of the predators, even in this gloom,
are able to distinguish their prey
silhouetted against the faint glimmer of light from above.
Hatchet fish, however, have a way of confusing any eyes
that might be searching for them from below.
Their bellies carry rows of light—producing cells
called photophores.
They can use these
to exactly match the changing colour of light from the surface far above.
This counter shading breaks up their silhouette,
making them almost invisible from below...
almost.
But these are no ordinary eyes.
The enormous yellow lenses enable their owner to distinguish
between light produced by photophores and sunlight.
So, one device for escape
is countered by another equally subtle one for attack
in an evolutionary arms race that has been waged for millions of years.
Descend below 1,000 metres,
and you enter the dark zone.
No sunlight whatsoever penetrates this deep.
The temperature of the water is below four degrees Centigrade.
The pressure is more than 100 times that at the surface.
Life becomes ever more sparse.
It's a dark, dangerous world.
Relative to body size,
these are the largest teeth in the ocean.
They are so big
that their owner can't close its mouth.
They belong to the fang tooth.
Unlike most deep sea fish,
this has powerful muscles
and is an aggressive hunter.
With food in such short supply at this depth,
dark zone predators have to be able to deal with a meal of any size.
Many animals here are dark red,
like this deep sea jelly.
Caught in the lights of the submersible,
it's a spectacular firework display of colour.
Normally, no red light penetrates as deep as this,
so animals with red pigment appear completely black down here,
perfectly concealed.
Predators here, however, don't just rely on vision —
many have tiny eyes.
Instead, their thin, rod—like bodies
are lined with organs sensitive to tiny movements in the water.
This monster, half a metre across,
is a hairy angler.
This is the first time it's been seen.
It's covered with hundreds of sensitive antennae,
which detect the movements
of any prey careless enough to stray too close
to this motionless predator.
But this, surely,
must be the strangest of all the deep sea fish yet discovered.
A highly sensitive metre—long tail
hangs down from the head that makes up a quarter of its body.
Its eyes are tiny,
but its mouth is truly enormous.
It's called the gulper eel
because it can engulf a meal of almost any size.
Hanging motionless in mid—water,
its enormous gape enables it to deal with passing prey,
whether it's small,
or large.
Gulper eels can swallow prey as big as themselves,
which is very useful in a world
where you never know when the next meal is coming along.
Even in the dark zone, there is SOME light.
Turn off the submersible headlights,
and you see a pyrotechnic display outside.
These lights are created by animals.
This is bioluminescence.
A deep sea angler fish flashes in the darkness.
The light is generated by bacteria
that live permanently inside the lure
which attracts prey to these murderous teeth.
There are all sorts of lures out in the darkness.
Come into my mouth, little fish!
And what is the purpose of THIS lure,
suspended on a long rod,
way below its owner's terrifying set of teeth?
It's difficult to be sure,
but then, this monster does have
another giant flashing lure
much closer to its mouth.
These fish are called anglers
because they use their lures in much the same way
as fly fishermen use their imitation flies.
For a hunting squid with huge eyes
this glimmer is intriguing.
It might just be food.
A satisfying meal
for a fish with a highly extendible stomach.
Attracting a mate
in this endless darkness
can be even harder than finding food.
Flashing lures may be helpful;
certainly, only female anglers have them.
The tiny males are just a tenth the size of the females.
Their only purpose is somehow to find a mate in the darkness.
She releases chemicals into the water
which the males scent with a special white organ in front of their eyes.
Having found a partner,
the male bites at her belly with specially designed teeth.
He needs to get permanently attached.
Within a matter of weeks,
the male is completely fused to the female,
and there he will stay for the rest of his life.
Her blood circulating in his body
provides him with all the sustenance he needs.
In return, she gets a continuous, reliable supply of sperm —
a brilliant solution to the problem of finding a mate
in the vast emptiness of the deep sea.
To help in the constant battle between predators and prey,
some fish in the dark zone
have developed headlights.
These light—producing photophores beneath their eyes
may be used to search out prey in the darkness.
Most bioluminescence in the deep sea
is blue or greenish—blue,
but a very few predatory fish
produce red light.
With this,
red prey becomes obvious in the darkness.
Red light is rare down here
and most animal eyes can't see it.
Only these fish can do so.
This gives them a sniper scope —
a headlight invisible to their targets.
This copepod, unalarmed,
takes no avoiding action.
Bioluminescence
is useful in escape
as well as attack.
A shrimp senses a threat.
It spins in the water,
releasing a bioluminescent glue.
This acts like a burglar alarm,
startling the attacking fish
and leaving it illuminated in the dark,
and vulnerable to its own predators.
These twinkling lights in the darkness
are produced by copepods.
They probably flash like this to communicate with one another
and confuse their predators.
The most sensitive eyes in the ocean
belong to an ostracod
called gigantocypris.
It's the size of a pea,
but that's enormous
for an ostracod.
Copepods are a favourite prey,
and it actively searches for their flashes in the darkness...
but this copepod has a way of confusing a hunting gigantocypris.
It discharges a packet of bioluminescent liquid.
The flash is delayed, like a depth charge.
Spinning, confused, in the water,
gigantocypris chases after the flashes...
and the copepod
slips away unseen
into the darkness.
The ultimate bioluminescent defence mechanism
has to be the light show
created by the deep sea jellyfish, periphylla.
That, presumably, is the way it scares away its enemies.
These bright lights are all produced by firefly squid.
Normally, they live way down at around 300 metres,
beyond the reach of these Japanese fishermen's nets...
but for a few months each spring, they come to the surface each night.
The brightest lights come from the bioluminescent tips
of their two front tentacles,
but it's only in the dark of the deep sea,
that you can really appreciate the full complexity of their displays.
It's not just their tentacles
but their whole bodies that are covered in photophores.
The exact function is not clear.
The bright tentacle tips may be for attracting mates
or dazzling predators.
The rest may be camouflage,
providing counter shading for the squid
as they journey up into the twilight zone.
Every night in the season,
hundreds of thousands of squid
journey up into the shallow water to spawn.
Before dawn, they will return to the depths,
leaving their eggs to develop in the shallows.
The daily cycle of the sun
has a profound influence on life in the deep ocean.
As the sun sets, it triggers the largest migration
of living organisms on our planet.
One thousand million tonnes of animals
travel up from the dark zone
into richer, shallower water every night.
Tiny grazers are first up,
searching for the microscopic plants
that only grow in shallow, sunlit waters.
Predators follow the grazers.
An enormous variety of different animals
join the convoy
or feed off it as it passes.
Many will travel up hundreds of metres towards the surface,
and, at dawn, finding themselves at risk from predators,
the visitors return to the safer darkness of the depths.
The sun's rays only have a direct effect
in the top 100 metres or so of the ocean.
It's only here that photosynthesis can take place
and coral reefs can flourish.
Leave this thin, rich slice of life
and travel over the outer face of the reef
and you quickly enter a far more demanding world.
Below 150 metres,
photosynthesis becomes impossible.
You find no plants,
just animals.
Here, the animals are adapted to catch marine snow —
particles of dead animals and plants that drift down from above.
So they depend second—hand on the energy captured from the sun
by organisms in the surface waters.
Travelling close to the sea floor,
we're going to take a journey to the very bottom
of the deep sea...
to a world completely separate from the mid—water above.
At around 300 metres,
the drop—off levels out, and we move out onto the continental slope.
This stretches for about 150 miles
from the coast,
sloping in a gentle gradient,
down to a maximum depth of 4,000 metres.
Water temperatures down here
drop below four degrees Centigrade
and the pressure can reach up to 400 times that of the surface.
Without the lights of the submersible,
it would be completely dark.
The water is crystal clear because there's so little organic matter.
Only three per cent of any food in the surface waters
reaches the continental slope.
At first sight, it appears a lifeless desert,
but take a closer look
and you notice a network of tracks and trails.
There is life even down here.
These animals would die immediately
if brought to the surface in nets,
so you can only see them behaving normally
from submersibles.
Many are new to science.
The deep sea floor is dominated
by echinoderms —
sea cucumbers, brittle stars
and sea urchins.
There are literally millions of them,
marching across the sea bed,
hoovering up any edible particles
in the sediment.
They come in all shapes and sizes,
and though they are thinly spread,
these are among the most numerous animals
on the planet.
Their spikes are good for locomotion and defence,
but perhaps not quite so good when it comes to mating.
Finding a mate in this largely empty sea floor
could be a problem,
so some urchins stay together in herds
to be sure that they're never too far from a potential partner.
Rocky outcrops provide good anchorage
for animals that rely on food that might drift past.
These crinoids or sea lilies look like plants,
but are, in fact, animals.
Their long stalks ensure that their umbrella of feeding tentacles
are positioned to best effect in the current.
Particles are swept onto the arms,
and carried down to a mouth in the middle of the umbrella.
These sudden movements swat away
tiny amphipods that try to steal the sea lily's captures.
Coral reefs are not supposed to exist in total darkness,
but recently, a new kind of coral
was found as deep as 2,000 metres.
In the cold waters of a Norwegian fjord,
there was a deep sea reef 30 metres high and 200 metres long.
This coral gets no energy from the sun, so it has to be very efficient
in catching food.
Its polyps are far larger than those of shallow water corals.
These are, in fact,
the largest coral polyps in the ocean.
They belong to the deep sea mushroom coral.
Their three—centimetre—long tentacles
can catch far larger prey
than other corals can.
This necessity to capture every particle of food
that comes within reach in this near desert
has radically changed many animals.
Most tunicates
are filter feeders,
but this one has become a predator
and its greatly enlarged siphon
has been converted into a trap.
Most sea cucumbers
stay firmly on the bottom,
but not this extraordinary deep sea species.
Its skirts of skin
allow it to swim hundreds of metres
above the sea floor.
Eventually, it will descend
and, with luck,
will land on fresh feeding grounds.
This has to be the most extraordinary animal design of all.
It's a polychaete worm
and, normally, you would expect the long, pulsating body
to be stick firmly in the sediment.
This worm,
alone in its group,
swims in the open water.
Propelling itself with its yellow frill,
it moves about
and so finds new sources of food,
or maybe succeeds in escaping from a predator.
This is chimaera, a close relative of the sharks,
less than a metre long.
Sensory pits on its chin help it hunt prey on the bottom,
while its surprisingly large eyes may help it spot bioluminescence.
Large fish are rare down here —
there's not enough live prey to sustain them.
Most have become scavengers.
A dead tuna has attracted a deep sea conger eel...
and a six—gilled shark.
These monsters grow
to eight metres long.
Six gills are living fossils.
For 150 million years, they've existed unchanged,
living in water as deep as 2,500 metres.
Very few people have glimpsed these sharks from submersibles,
and we know almost nothing about their behaviour.
The body of a tuna is a substantial meal,
but just occasionally,
a really gigantic corpse
drifts down to the deep sea floor.
This is the freshly dead carcass
of a 30—tonne grey whale.
It's resting on the sea floor a mile down.
It's only been on the bottom for six weeks,
but already it has attracted hundreds of hagfish.
These ancient scavengers
are nearly always the first to discover a fallen body,
and are attracted from miles around.
They lack jaws and rasp at the flesh with two rows of horny teeth
on either side of their sucker—like mouths.
Next to arrive,
a sleeper shark — a real deep sea specialist.
They grow to over seven metres long,
and have never been filmed at such a depth before.
The gaping wounds in the whale's flank are its work.
Unlike the hagfish, it has powerful jaws,
so is able to rip off huge chunks of meat.
Sharks, hagfish
and a whole succession of different deep sea scavengers
will feast on the carcass for years before all its nutriment is gone.
Eighteen months later,
when we returned to this whale,
all that was left was a perfect skeleton stripped bare.
It was almost as if a museum specimen
had been carefully laid out on the sea floor.
At first, the skeleton seemed totally abandoned,
but even after so long, there was still some flesh left in the head.
Hagfish have a skeleton of cartilage and are so flexible
that they tie themselves into knots
and so get a better purchase on the flesh they feed on.
But smaller organisms had fed here.
A thick band of white bacteria
had formed on the mud
outlining the original shape of the whale,
and on the skeleton itself,
colonies of specialised bacteria
were extracting energy from the bones themselves.
Most remarkably, and in huge abundance,
polychaete worms were collecting the last edible fragments.
These are a new species
that so far have only been found on the fallen bodies of whales.
Scientists have discovered 178 different animals
on a single whale vertebra,
most of which have been found nowhere else.
This whale, lying over a mile down,
was not filmed from a submersible with an acrylic sphere.
Such craft can't go as deep as this.
To withstand the pressure here,
you need a far stronger submersible.
This is Alvin,
a two—metre—wide sphere with just enough room in it
for a pilot and two observers.
Its walls are made of titanium.
The viewing ports have to be tiny —
any larger, and the submersible would implode
under the enormous pressure down here.
Alvin can dive
to 4,500 metres,
three miles below the surface.
Around 3,000 metres, the continental slope finally flattens out
and joins the abyssal plain.
This covers over half the earth's surface.
Mostly it's completely flat,
but in places it's gashed by massive trenches
hundreds of miles wide.
The deepest of these is the Mariana Trench,
which drops to over seven miles below sea level.
There are just five manned submersibles world—wide
that can reach the abyssal plain,
and between them so far,
they have explored less than one per cent of it.
There are a thousand times fewer large animals down here
than on the continental slope,
but in places,
hundreds of brittle stars cross the sea bed in search of food.
Fish have been found right down to the bottom of the deepest trenches.
Most come from one family —
the aptly named rattails.
They forage near the sea floor
and use their battery of sensory pits
to follow odour trails from rotting carcasses.
Rattails can travel long distances
across the abyssal plain
in search of food,
but others down here prefer to sit and wait.
This is a tripod fish.
It supports itself on two specially adapted fin rays
and can sit motionless for hour after hour.
It does have tiny eyes,
but it's almost totally blind.
It locates potential prey
with a pair of fins behind its head
which are sensitive to even tiny movements.
We know more about the surface of the moon
than we do about the abyssal plain.
Every dive still produces complete surprises.
This deep sea octopus
is about the size of a beach ball
and has been nicknamed Dumbo.
An umbrella of skin between its tentacles
and its extraordinary flapping ears
allow Dumbo to hover effortlessly
over the sea floor
as it searches for food.
Right in the middle of the abyssal plain
lie the largest geological structures on our planet...
the mid—ocean ridges.
Rising almost two miles off the sea floor,
the ridges extend for over 28,000 miles,
the largest mountain chain on Earth.
When submersibles finally succeeded
in reaching the ridges in the 1970s,
they found an extraordinary world
with mile upon mile of once molten rock
that had welled up from the deep in the past and had now solidified.
They discovered towering chimneys,
pouring out water as hot as molten lead.
At the surface, water becomes steam at 100 degrees Centigrade,
but here, under the immense pressure of the ocean,
it remains liquid at temperatures as hot as 400 degrees Centigrade.
The submersible has to move carefully.
Disaster is very close when surrounded
by such enormous temperatures and pressures.
And here, where the very water is loaded
with hydrogen sulphides poisonous to normal life processes,
they found living creatures.
Some of the chimneys were encrusted with white tubes.
The tubes were inhabited
by a new species of polychaete worm
that was exposed to temperatures as high as 80 degrees Centigrade.
No other animal on Earth was known to tolerate such high temperatures,
so the scientists called these creatures Pompeii worms.
But this was just the beginning.
Nearby, there were chimneys
covered by whole communities of different organisms.
The bottom of the vent was encrusted with large mussels.
There were swarms of white crabs,
and, most spectacular of all,
dominating the chimney were hundreds of bright red tubeworms,
each two metres long and four centimetres wide.
Until these creatures were discovered,
all life on Earth was thought to be dependent on the sun,
but here, in the complete darkness of the deep,
they had discovered a rich density of life
that derived no energy from the sun.
So what do they live on?
The answer was found within the tubeworms themselves.
They were packed full of specialised bacteria
that are able to derive energy
from the sulphides that pour from the vents.
The worms' plumes were bright red with haemoglobin
that carries sulphides and oxygen down to the bacteria.
These bacterial colonies
are the primary source of energy for all that lives here.
The mussels were packed with them.
Just as green plants
are the basis of life for animals living in the sun,
so these bacteria and other microbes
are at the foot of the food chain
on which over 500 species depend.
Crabs and shrimps feed off bacteria
and even try to steal pieces of tubeworm plumes.
Since the vents were first visited by biologists in 1979,
a new species has been described every ten days.
At the top of the food chain, fish that never stray far from the vents,
but they or their descendants will move eventually,
for we now know that individualvents are rarely active
for more than a few decades.
Such a density of life
living in such harsh conditions
in the middle of a vast and otherwise barren abyssal plain
astounded the biologists who first saw it.
It seemed to them that here was evidence of how life on this planet,
which certainly started in the sea, might have begun.
Deep sea submersibles
made an even more extraordinary discovery in 1990.
Over half a mile down,
at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico,
they came across what appeared to be an underwater lake,
over 20 metres long,
with its own sandy shore.
Around its edge, there even seemed to be a tide line,
but this couldn't be, of course,
this was underwater.
In fact, the lapping edge was created
by a thick soup of salty brine
far heavier than the surrounding sea water,
and the sand was made up
of hundreds of thousands of mussels.
Once again, in the midst of a totally barren sea bed,
an extraordinarily rich oasis of life
totally independent of the sun's energy.
The source of energy this time was not sulphides
but methane bubbling out of the sea bed, and once again,
the mussels carried special bacteria
capable of fixing the methane's energy.
Just like the hot vents,
a complete ecosystem had developed based on the bacteria.
There was an enormous variety of completely new species — shrimps,
weird squat lobsters,
and bright red
polychaete worms.
These oases were called cold seeps
and were surprisingly similar to the hot vents.
The geological processes in the sea floor that produce methane
also tend to result in the release of hydrogen sulphides.
It was hardly surprising, then,
when, not far from the brine pool,
they found tubeworms...
extensive fields of tubeworms
that stretch for hundreds of metres.
This new species also uses bacteria
to fix energy from sulphides,
but it extracts them directly from the ground.
Their beautiful gills
are only used to supply oxygen to the bacteria.
Amazingly, these tubeworms are over 200 years old.
While hot vent tubeworms
may be the fastest—growing invertebrates in the sea,
these appear to be far slower —
all the more reason to protect your gills from biting amphipods.
The energy sources exploited by the hot vent animals
may suddenly fail,
but here, life can enjoy a more stable geological future.
To discover within ten years two completely new ecosystems,
both totally independent of the sun's energy,
has been quite extraordinary.
So far, we have explored just one per cent of the deep ocean floor.
Who knows what is still out there to be discovered?