Hunters of the Dark Ocean, Part 2
37:13 Share

Divorce can leave you feeling isolated, like you're stuck on an island with no direction. But you don't have to go through it alone. At Hello Divorce, we guide you step by step, offering everything from legal advice to financial planning so you can find your way back to solid ground. Start your divorce journey with the support you need at HelloDivorce.com because you deserve a better path forward. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft.

Developers like you are building the future, but you need the right tools to push what's possible. That's where Microsoft comes in. With GitHub Copilot, VS Code, Azure AI Foundry, and more. You have the tools to build your way and bring your ideas to life. You can build confidently, securely, and focus on creating the next big thing. Learn more at developer.microsoft.com slash AI. Microsoft. Yours to build.

At T-Mobile, our critical mission is providing unparalleled 5G coverage for when connectivity is mission critical. Introducing T-Priority, America's best 5G network experience for first responders, even in times of congestion. More capacity, faster speeds, better coverage. T-Priority from T-Mobile, built for tomorrow's emergencies, ready today. Discover more at t-priority.com.

For qualifying organizations on eligible rate plans, coverage is not available in some areas and may be impacted by emergencies. Hey there, this is Matt and Joel from the How to Money podcast. Indeed. And this spring is a great time to start thinking about travel plans for the summer, figuring out how you're going to pay for that travel as well. And one great way to financially support your travel is to host your home on Airbnb.com.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in a series we are calling Hunters of the Dark Ocean, focusing on predators that operate in deep marine environments. And folks, full disclosure, if we sound like we're broadcasting from the bottom of the sea ourselves today, I think Rob and I are both maybe operating at lower power than usual today.

I don't know. Do you have a story here, Rob? Oh, just that I'm battling a cold. And as of right now, all the cold medicine is like firing at full throttle. Oh, nice. So we timed it just right. Yeah, timed it just right. It may wear off halfway through.

And you, the listener, get to appreciate like a slightly gravelly, sexier voice from me as we discuss various slimy creatures that live in the depths. Yeah. So I was up a lot last night. It was just childcare related. Lack of sleep. But hey, here we are. We're coming to you once again, folks. Yeah.

So brief recap on part one of this series. In the last episode, we kicked things off talking about the science news story that originally inspired us to look at this topic of deep ocean predators.

That was a paper published last November in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity by Weston et al., documenting a newly discovered genus and species of predatory crustacean, which is found in the Atacama Trench in the southeastern Pacific.

The species was given the name Dulcibella comanchaca, the sugary darkness, as we talked about. And oh boy, that really sent us down a rabbit hole of scrutinizing, bizarre deep sea amphipod body forms. It was a good time. We also talked a bit

about the general challenges facing organisms, including predators, that live in the deepest parts of the ocean. Not just pressure, darkness, and cold, but also unique resource challenges. Since sunlight doesn't reach the bottom of the ocean, it is generally devoid of the primary photosynthetic organisms that form the base of the food chain at the surface. Instead, the deep ocean food chain tends to build off of a couple of things—

First, chemosynthetic organisms like bacteria and archaea that feed off of

hydrogen sulfide and other compounds from geological sources like hydrothermal vents. And then second, dead organic material and detritus that rains down from the sun-touched ocean above. This is sometimes called marine snow. It includes everything from fecal matter and tiny dead organisms sinking down, things sinking down of every shape and size and

And we also talked about the fascinating temporary ecosystems that spring up around a big payload that falls from above, like a whale carcass when it hits the bottom in the abyssal or hadal zone. Yeah, and one of the things, too, that we were driving home in that episode, and we're going to continue to stress here and in subsequent episodes, is that...

There is a great deal of biodiversity in these depths, and it basically runs opposite of what the prevailing theory was at one point, that you would just see a steady decline in biodiversity down to nothing and that just there would just be no life in the ocean past certain depths.

And we know that's not the case now, in part due to things like the marine snow, the whale falls, and those hydrothermal environments as well. But also just in general, creatures that have evolved to thrive at depths that we used to think were maybe just not possible. But

But anyway, back to recapping part one. After we talked about those general issues and talked about the predatory amphipod, we looked at a totally different order of oceanic predators known as siphonophores. And we discussed the fascinating way that their bodies are put together, the versions of these organisms that are as long as a whale, as thin as a rail, catching prey in a sort of net made from their own bodies, etc.

And then we discussed how despite most sightings of siphonophores occurring at less extreme depths, Rob, you turned up some research that included probable sightings of predatory siphonophores at hadal depths down within the Mariana Trench. That's right. And so today we're back to discuss more. Now, before we jump back in with the predators, though, I want to just quickly discuss an example of a scavenging organism in the mid-depths.

polychaete worm called Pobius maceris, or simply the balloon worm, as it's more practical, it's a more common name, because it does look like a balloon. It has a small body. It's like 1.5 inches or 36 millimeters long. And it kind of looks like, I've seen it described as like a plastic bag, like a plastic bag that is filled with fluid. It's very translucent looking.

And basically, that marine snow, all of those bits of flesh, fish poop, and other organic detritus that just drifts down from the depths above, that's literally all this thing eats. And these things are quite abundant. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, they play a key role in cycling nutrients like carbon from the ocean's surface down into its depths.

And also, no doubt, these are the prey animals for various predators in the depths as well.

Yeah. And that lines up with something we talked about in part one, where in these deep habitats, uh, a lot of the, the main prey species being scavengers. So again, we got this, you know, the, the kind of, uh, marine debris, organic debris of various kinds raining down from above. Then you've got the animals that scavenge off of that dead material. And then you've got the predators that come and eat those scavengers. And then perhaps also you may have predators that eat those predators, but, uh,

but certainly you have lots of predators that eat the scavenging things, scavenging things like amphipods that we talked about last time. Mm-hmm.

So there is an animal that I want to bring up, a deep sea predator that I came across just kind of randomly that I wanted to focus on for a bit because, yes, it looks weird, but it looks weird in a way that is biologically connected to some themes we've been exploring and we'll continue to explore some more. And that is an abyssal predator known as Hypnops meat eye or the grid eye fish so that that

genus and species is spelled I-P-N-O-P-S and the species is M-E-A-D-I. I want to give a shout out to the place where I learned about this fish. It was in a mission log hosted on the NOAA Ocean Exploration Hub from May 2017 by an oceanographer named Astrid Leitner at the time of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I looked her up and I believe she's now affiliated with Oregon State University.

But in this post, Leitner is talking about what she and a group of colleagues found during one particular exploration dive in the Central Pacific Basin, specifically a soft sedimented abyssal plain around what's called the Clipperton Fracture Zone at a depth of about 4,400 meters.

And just want to note that the overall expedition here, so this was one dive on a larger expedition, the overall expedition was called Mountains in the Deep, Exploring the Central Pacific Basin.

Uh, and one cool connection here is that she's mentioning some of the other scientists involved in this dive. And one of them is a previous Stuff to Blow Your Mind guest, uh, Diva Amon, who if, uh, yeah, if you want to check out an interview that we did with a marine biologist who studies the deep sea, you should look up our episode with her in the back catalog. It's got to be.

Well, probably five or six years ago now. But yeah, Diva Amon spelled A-M-O-N. Oh, yeah, she was great. The only guest we've had on the show, I think, that has actually personally been down into the deep ocean. I remember that being a good episode. I enjoyed talking with her.

But anyway, in this post talking about this dive in the Pacific, Leitner is describing a survey of organisms that these researchers did over this kind of vast, relatively flat, sedimented patch of seafloor. Now, in the last episode, we were talking a good bit about the Hadal zone, like the deepest part.

45% or so of the ocean by depth, if you're just looking vertically. Of course, the Hadal zone is limited to ocean trenches, so that's a small minority of the ocean's horizontal surface. Most of the ocean floor is not nearly that deep, and it's what we would normally call the abyssal zone. That's what we're looking at here is the abyssal zone. So not deep, deep in the trenches, but still very deep. It's just the floor of most of the regular part of the ocean.

And talking about this abyssal plane, Leitner says that these habitats have long been assumed to be what she calls biologically monotonous. I interpret that to mean you would expect to find roughly the same distribution of species all across them. But then she says, you know, really, that was just sort of a guess. There were not enough observations of these habitats to know what life forms were there and if there were major variations in species throughout space.

Uh, so Leitner says that during this one dive that she's talking about, the most abundant fishes they found, uh, on the seafloor here were the fish that I mentioned at the top of this segment. If nops me die or the, the grid, I fish, this was named after a 20th century American ichthyologist and named it Giles Mead.

And she says that they cataloged seven of these fish during one dive exploring the soft sediment and that they're actually pretty easy to spot because of their huge, highly reflective eyes. Now, you might be trying to picture them in your head. How reflective? How easy would these things be to spot? Well, Rob, I want you to weigh in here after looking at a picture in the outline. Oh, wow. Yes, that's rather distinctive.

So the fish's body is long and tube-like with dark pigmentation. It appears to be gliding along the ocean floor right over the top of the sediment. But on the top of its head, so not really the front, it's like right down on the top, it looks like somebody has scooped out two little lima bean-shaped depressions in the fish's skull. Mm-hmm.

And then, so if you imagine them together, like the flat sides of the lima bean shapes are facing inward, touching one another. So like put two lima beans right next to each other with the flat sides together.

And you scoop out that volume from the skull and then you paint in the two scooped out regions with neon yellow glow in the dark paint. So it really does look like those toys I had when I was a kid, the little monster where you hold it up to the light bulb and then you turn the light off and it glows. Looks exactly like that.

Now, this little guy might not look especially threatening given the Lisa Frank eyes, or I don't know, maybe it does look more threatening. I guess I'm sort of reminded of some kind of movie poster. I can't remember exactly what it is, but there's a monster that has eyes like this, just big, you know, undifferentiated neon yellow spots. But whether or not it looks threatening to you, this actually is a predator eating small abyssal crustaceans.

And while I think its biology is not fully understood, it seems that these bony plate like neon bean cup eyes lack a lens and thus cannot resolve images. So it is seeing in a way, but it's probably not seeing images. Instead, these things are thought to only detect the presence or absence of light. They're more like light spots.

and thus are probably designed by evolution to sense bioluminescence from nearby prey. And I was thinking about this, and I think it's just so interesting the different ways that light as just a type of energy works.

features throughout the trophic relationships at the surface where there's plenty of sunlight versus at the bottom of the sea light plays a role in the food chain in both places but those roles are so different that

So at the surface, light plays the primary energy role at the base of the food chain. Light from the sun powers photosynthesis and plants and other autotrophs, and that sets off the chain of eating that goes all the way up to the top predators.

And then in addition to its role as the base energy input on the whole system, it also provides probably the most important type of information that fast-moving animals use to survive and negotiate predation relationships from either side of the predator-prey relationship. So whether you're a predator or a prey animal on the surface, one of your main jobs is seeing other animals,

And in some cases, avoiding being seen. It's all an information game based on reflected light from the sun. Deep at the bottom of the ocean, it seems that light is still a major energy input on the food chain because, of course, it powers the food chain up above at the surface, which then at some point rains down as the marine snow or the whale fall for the scavengers at the bottom of the ocean subsides.

But there is also at the bottom of the ocean, different energy input. You got the energy input from chemosynthetic organisms around like seafloor vents and things.

And then also down in the abyssal or the hadal darkness, light plays an important relationship in this information competition between predators and prey. But it's not reflected light from the sun that plays that role. It seems to be primarily bioluminescent light. And the way that it contributes to that struggle for information advantage between predators and prey is a bit different. That's right. Yeah, it is a difference.

It's not a realm where there is no light, but the sort of like the rules of light have changed. The importance of light has changed. ♪

Divorce can leave you feeling isolated, like you're stuck on an island with no direction. But you don't have to go through it alone. At Hello Divorce, we guide you step by step, offering everything from legal advice to financial planning so you can find your way back to solid ground. Start your divorce journey with the support you need at hellodivorce.com because you deserve a better path forward.

A great friend can blow your mind in a lot of ways, like with a fantastic fact or an amazing anecdote. But now T-Mobile wants you to experience a new kind of mind-blowing relationship. T-Mobile 5G home internet. They've got this thing called Wi-Fi mesh that basically means parts of your house where the Wi-Fi was spotty before can be, well, great.

And catching up with the latest shows and movies is easy because Hulu with ads and Paramount Plus Essential are included in your plan. It's easy to see why T-Mobile is number one in customer satisfaction for home wireless internet nationwide by J.D. Power. That's right. T-Mobile has home internet with great benefits like these and a price for every budget. And thanks to PriceLock, they won't raise your rate on internet. Check availability at T-Mobile.com slash home internet.

Price lock exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Guarantees regular monthly rate plan price of fixed wireless 5G internet data with qualifying service. Additional terms apply. For J.D. Power 2024 award information, visit jdpower.com slash awards.

You know, when the world gets a little crazy and everything is moving too fast, don't you just wish you could get away from all of it for a while? Well, that's exactly what the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano can do for you. And to be clear, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. It was designed from the ground up to be a refuge from the daily grind. I mean, it has a Bose premium sound system, which can play your favorite, most relaxing music.

And there's nothing like a world-class audio system to just transport you to a better headspace. Then there's the Murano's massaging leather-appointed seats. Yeah, massaging seats. Talk about melting away your stress. So, could getting stuck in traffic become your happy place? I don't know. It sounds like it could in the all-new Murano. You should probably check one out for yourself. You gotta drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bows and massaging leather-appointed seats are optional features.

Cauliflower has done it again, and pickle lovers, this one's for you. Introducing the first and only frozen dill pickle pizza, and it's going to blow your taste buds away. This one-of-a-kind creation starts with Cauliflower's iconic stone-fired crust, made with real cauliflower florets, now topped with the number one trending flavor of the year. Picture a luxurious creamy white sauce infused with savory dill pickle brine,

Garlic roasted to perfection. Melty mozzarella cheese and fresh dill. It's a flavor explosion that's as unique as it is craveable. And because it's Kali Power, you know it's made better for you. It's gluten-free, clean label, and packed with 14 grams of protein. And best of all, you can eat half the pizza for just 400 calories.

Find Kali Power's Dill Pickle Pizza now at Whole Foods Market nationwide. It's time to taste the buzz everyone's talking about, and it's kind of a big deal. And so I guess you could look at the grid eye fish here as being an example of a case where evolution has just decided, you know,

we can scale back on the eyes a little bit. We still need them, but we need them for just specific things. And the next example we're going to discuss is one that kind of goes in a different direction entirely with the eyes. It really feels more like a scaling up, but also a hyper-specialization of its ocular equipment. Tell me more.

So I'm going to warn you that this creature's common name does sound a bit ridiculous, and it may earworm you with a Beatles song, but we're talking about strawberry squid here. Strawberry squids forever. So-called for their red coloration, as well as the little marks on their skin that really do look like the seeds of a strawberry.

Oh, so do I mean, if you zoom in on the skin of this thing, it's uncanny how much it looks like a strawberry. Yeah, because sometimes, you know, the naming of these creatures, it can be a bit off and just kind of have to squint a little bit to see it for yourself. But here it's pretty spot on.

Its scientific name is histiotoothis heteropsis. And the heteropsis gets more of the point here as it translates to different sight or different eye. Oh, yes. OK, so this is the squid. If people have seen a picture of this before and the thing you didn't notice about it was the strawberry texture of the skin.

You may have noticed the two wildly different looking eyes. That's right. Almost kind of a reminded of the whole sleep with one eye open thing. But yeah, it has. But they're both open, but they're just different sizes and they see in different ways. It's pretty amazing. It's like the Christ Pantocrator. Yeah.

So according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, our strawberry squid here reaches a maximum mantle length of 13 centimeters or 5 inches, and its habitat is the midwater region of the twilight or mesopelagic zone. So we're talking the upper portions of the aphotic zone, the dark ocean, but the dark ocean nonetheless. However, the strawberry squid may reach depths of 3,300 feet during the day, but then migrates to shallower waters at night.

Okay. And so we've talked about organisms like this before. I mean, one great example being the sperm whale that operates in radically different light regimes at different parts of its sort of feeding cycle. Like it might come up to shallow waters. Of course, the whale would have to come up to the surface to breathe, but then it dives very deep into the dark in order to feed. And this would be another type of organism that goes a little bit more up into the light zone and then down into the darker zone.

Right, right. But of course, unlike the sperm whale, the sperm whale does at different phases of its life have to deal with predation. But this critter is more like your common house cat being both predator and prey at all times. Not so much in the confines of your house, but in the confines of the natural world.

So there are two properties that are especially revealing here with this organism regarding life in the deep. First, I want to talk a little bit about its strawberry coloration.

and as well as the seeds. So again, those are not seeds, obviously. Those little marks on its red flesh are bioluminescent photophores. Those are light-emitting organs. Now, in general, cephalopods use photophores for different forms of camouflage and anti-predation, and they can pop up in various locations on the cephalopod body plan.

But for the strawberry squid here, they're on the outer skin. And the purpose here does qualify as anti-predation. Hmm. Okay. So that's kind of hard to understand because you would think that

You would think that lighting up your body would attract predators, not repel them. So how does this work? That's right. Well, we have to remember that this is the twilight zone. Some light does make it down this far during the day. And if something is looking up at you from beneath, it will see your outline against that filtered light. If you put it in like sci-fi film setting, imagine a starship, large starship powered down.

It's just a dark form, but it's moving against the stars. And with a keen eye, you might notice that when you might think, well, if you wanted to disguise your powered down vessel, if you were to cover it with little shiny stars, well, that might help mask your appearance. That might allow you to blend in to the star field. And that's sort of what's going on with the strawberry squid here. It uses its bioluminescence technology.

to mask itself against, to blend in with the filtered down light from above against predators below. I have a quote here that explains this general adaptation. This is from a 1983 text by Richard Edward Young titled Oceanic Bioluminescence, an Overview of General Functions. He writes, quote, this function is the only one for which we have substantial experimental data.

The hypothesis is an old and simple one. Dahlgren suggested that blue light from the ventral photophores in squids would cause these animals in deep water to blend with the sunlight when viewed from below. The process that allows a mesopelagic animal to eliminate its silhouette with bioluminescence and thereby conceal itself requires a very sophisticated mechanism in the animals that utilize it well.

For maximum effectiveness, they must precisely match their luminescence to the intensity, angular distribution, and color of the downwelling light. For those that counter-illuminate in near-surface waters at night, where the light field is much more variable than in deep water, the mechanism must be especially complex.

Wow. So it's almost like what we see in the movie Predator in a way where, you know, the Predators and invisibility cloak seems to be a way of kind of projecting an image of the light patterns from behind the alien onto the front facing side of it. So that when you're looking at it, it's like a movie screen showing you what you would expect to see if the thing were not there from the from the backside. Yeah.

It might not have to be that exact with outlines and images in the case of the squid, but it does need to very closely match the light intensity and the color patterns and angular distribution of the light that would be coming down from above otherwise. Yeah, so to humanize this sort of light show, it may not be as complicated.

as impressive as watching, say, a cuttlefish or some other, you know, or some sort of, you know, shallow water octopus blending in with its environment, with its camouflage. But it is a complex act nonetheless. So it isn't just a matter of like, well, let's just throw some stars up there on your hide so that whatever's below can't make you out. Like, it's more nuanced and it's about hitting the right light intensity. And

at all times. Now, that strawberry red coloration, that's a little bit more straightforward, but it reveals another curious relationship with light in the deep. This is one we've touched on before in the past, and it is red. The color red may be the color of caution and notice on the surface. You know, it is the color you might wear to...

to a wedding if you want to attract attention, that sort of thing. It is the color of, it's a flashy color. It's a sports car color, right? But in the depths, it's a stealth color. And that's because red light doesn't filter this far deep. And so red organisms appear quite black in the natural illumination, i.e. not like submarine illumination. Thus, further cloaking

the organism here in question from predators, but in a more passive way. I see. So like it's because the longer wavelengths of visible light don't make it as deep in the water. So the red, the more red colors just don't really get reflected. Everything's kind of blue shifted down there.

Yeah. But finally, we have to talk about the strawberry squid's eyes in greater depth here. It does have very weird eyes. Again, different sizes. One big tubular and yellow lensed. And this is to keep an eye out above for the shadows of prey moving through dim waters.

And then there's this much smaller specialized eye to keep an eye out below for bioluminescence of potential predators. So it's looking for shadows that it wants to eat and glowing things that want to eat it.

Yes, exactly. And it's I mean, it's really hard to think about this in terms of like the human perspective, because I mean, you might imagine like, what if I had one eye that could see really well in the day and one eye that would see really well in the night? Well, sort of. And in fact, there were older theories that that's what was going on here, that this squid had two different eyes, one for when it was at lower depths and one when it was at greater depths. But

this would only work, this human example would only work if you were living in the sort of environment that this creature lives in, in which you were on the threshold of darkness and light pretty much at all times. Yeah. I mean, in a way we do have eyes that can function in high and low light conditions because we have adjustable sizes. Like we can adjust the aperture of the pupil. So, you know, they contract in when there's a lot of light and dilate when there's less light.

Uh, but this is fit. Yeah, this is a squid is in a different situation than we are because we, we are almost never in a situation where we need to be looking in one direction where there's more light and in another direction where there's less light. Also, we have binocular vision. So we're generally, yeah.

We're looking in the same direction with both of our eyes to get a perception of depth. Instead, this squid really has eyes on the back of its head, whichever way you look from. And one way needs to be looking toward the sky and the other eye needs to be looking away.

Yeah, another imperfect way of thinking about this would be like if you had a human with one normal eye and then one eye that was essentially blind but saw really well into the astral plane ever on the lookout for astro zombies that are coming to try and kill you.

So these eyes apparently differentiate as the squid enters adulthood, distorting the shape of the head to accommodate the larger upward-gazing eye. And the dimorphism is because it's a creature, again, with an eye and two realms of light at the same time.

And I was reading a bit more about this. Thompson, Rob Robinson and Johnson explored the creature's asymmetric vision in a 2017 paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. B, they point out that the dim to dark mesopelagic region of the deep sea boasts the highest diversity of visual adaptations in the sea.

A lot of evolutionary energy has to go into scraping out a survival story in this region, dealing with bioluminescence below and filtered sunlight above. But it is, quote, a fertile environment for eye evolution. Now, we mentioned that that upward gazing eye has a yellow lens. And they point out that this may be used to break up the counter illumination camouflage of their prey.

They found it in 65% of the specimens that they looked at. Yellow lenses are apparently common in upward-looking deep-sea organisms as well, like in fish, because they're thought to, quote, break counter-illumination camouflage by enhancing spectral differences between downwelling sunlight and bioluminescent camouflage. So it's geared at deciphering the very sort of counter-illumination camouflage that it itself uses.

Hmm. Okay. So it's like it simultaneously is wearing a kind of lead shielding and x-ray glasses. Yeah. They point out that body posture is also key. They position themselves with their head and arms downward with the posterior mantle pointed upward in a vertical posture. And this ensures that they're pointing their photophores downward again to, to cast that, uh, that, uh, counter illumination spell. Okay.

And I think it's just such a fascinating example of a form that has evolved to thrive in a delicate environment. So their predators include various sharks and even whales. And as for what they themselves prey upon, stomach contents suggest a mix of fish, other squid, as well as crustaceans. Strawberry squids forever. Let me take you down. ♪

Divorce can leave you feeling isolated, like you're stuck on an island with no direction. But you don't have to go through it alone. At Hello Divorce, we guide you step by step, offering everything from legal advice to financial planning so you can find your way back to solid ground. Start your divorce journey with the support you need at hellodivorce.com because you deserve a better path forward.

A great friend can blow your mind in a lot of ways, like with a fantastic fact or an amazing anecdote. But now T-Mobile wants you to experience a new kind of mind-blowing relationship. T-Mobile 5G home internet. They've got this thing called Wi-Fi mesh that basically means parts of your house where the Wi-Fi was spotty before can be, well, great.

And catching up with the latest shows and movies is easy because Hulu with ads and Paramount Plus Essential are included in your plan. It's easy to see why T-Mobile is number one in customer satisfaction for home wireless internet nationwide by J.D. Power. That's right. T-Mobile has home internet with great benefits like these and a price for every budget. And thanks to PriceLock, they won't raise your rate on internet. Check availability at T-Mobile.com slash home internet.

Price lock exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Guarantees regular monthly rate plan price of fixed wireless 5G internet data with qualifying service. Additional terms apply. For J.D. Power 2024 award information, visit jdpower.com slash awards.

You know, when the world gets a little crazy and everything is moving too fast, don't you just wish you could get away from all of it for a while? Well, that's exactly what the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano can do for you. And to be clear, you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. It was designed from the ground up to be a refuge from the daily grind. I mean, it has a Bose premium sound system, which can play your favorite, most relaxing music.

And there's nothing like a world-class audio system to just transport you to a better headspace. Then there's the Murano's massaging leather-appointed seats. Yeah, massaging seats. Talk about melting away your stress. So, could getting stuck in traffic become your happy place? I don't know. It sounds like it could in the all-new Murano. You should probably check one out for yourself. You gotta drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bows and massaging leather-appointed seats are optional features.

Cauliflower has done it again, and pickle lovers, this one's for you. Introducing the first and only frozen dill pickle pizza, and it's going to blow your taste buds away. This one-of-a-kind creation starts with Cauliflower's iconic stone-fired crust, made with real cauliflower florets, now topped with the number one trending flavor of the year. Picture a luxurious creamy white sauce infused with savory dill pickle brine,

Garlic roasted to perfection, melty mozzarella cheese, and fresh dill. It's a flavor explosion that's as unique as it is craveable. And because it's Kali Power, you know it's made better for you. It's gluten-free, clean label, and packed with 14 grams of protein. And best of all, you can eat half the pizza for just 400 calories.

Find Kali Power's Dill Pickle Pizza now at Whole Foods Market nationwide. It's time to taste the buzz everyone's talking about, and it's kind of a big deal.

Alright, now the next deep sea organism I want to talk about is the fin deep sea octopuses of the genus Grimpotuthis, commonly referred to as Dumbo octopuses because, I mean, well, just look at them. I included a couple of images here for you, Joe. They're adorable and beautiful.

They boast ear-like fins that remind many of Dumbo the flying elephant. They look tremendously like Dumbo, yes. Extremely cute and with big floppy ears and almost, yeah, kind of elephantine shape to their lumpy head body. Sometimes the position of their arms also kind of

reminds one of a trunk or trunks, like it's some sort of weird multi-trunked elephant, that sort of thing. So the Dumbo octopuses, they're members of the Serena suborder of octopods. And

who are notable for having evolved away from jet propulsion in favor of fin propulsion. So if you've ever consumed, you know, any cephalopod media or, you know, learned about them in the past, you know that I think squid are some of the more fabulous examples of this. They use jet propulsion. They take in a bunch of water and then they jet it out to push them along through the water, often at, you know, nice high speeds.

Oh, marine rockets. Yeah, little marine rockets. These octopods, however, have jettisoned that. They also tend to lack anal flaps and ink sacs, so they can't jet ink.

which is another common self-defense mechanism of cephalopods, being able to just squirt out that cloud of ink and make a quick escape. Yeah, it's like the Batman smoke escape bomb. Right. And they also lack chromatophores, so they can't adjust their coloration. They can't do any kind of blending in with their environment other than what their natural coloration is already providing.

Okay. Their arms are webbed together, which also earns them the informal name of umbrella octopuses. Oh, well, that's just adorable.

So what we have then is a bunch of creatures that seem to have just abandoned most of like the really expensive, evolutionarily speaking, self-defense mechanisms that their kin have evolved in favor of a more just sort of drifting leisurely existence. Now, why would that be? Well, it has everything to do with how deep they actually reside.

They reside at extreme depths of at least 13,100 feet or 4,000 meters, putting them squarely in the abyssopelagic zone. So way down there, not quite into the hadal, but still pretty darn deep, like way, like in a way we keep mentioning the hadal zone as being like, this is the extreme. This is where the real depth happens. But no, the hadal zone is just that

extra topping on the inverted cake here. And everything is already just crushingly deep before we reach that threshold. Yeah, us talking about the ocean trenches was not to suggest that the horizontal surface of most of the bottom of the ocean is not that deep. It is. The regular abyssal zone is deep. So what do the Dumbo octopuses eat? Well, first of all, they're not that big, 8 to 12 inches in length.

And here in the depths, they forage for pelagic invertebrates, generally close to the seafloor in the area that they're thriving. But they don't, it's important to note, they don't like crawl around seemingly on the seafloor like other octopods are observed to do. They live, you know, in the water. They do go down to the seafloor as well, though, to lay their eggs, generally on deep water corals.

But otherwise, yeah, they're free swimming, dreamy floaters in the depths.

that have, you know, cast aside all of their evolved weaponry. And it's because, you know, they don't seem to have to deal with that many predators. They do have predators, you know, generally diving predators from above. But it seems that they likely lost their various costly defense mechanisms because they thrive in a rather depopulated region of the deep. Hmm.

Okay. And this is a type of adaptation that we've seen in other animals and other ecosystems where, you know, you can lose a lot of your defenses if you just adapt so that you are able to thrive in a difficult environment where there are not a lot of predators. Yeah. It reminds me, in an imperfect way, I'm sure, of when I was a kid, I would look at all these airplane illustrations and sketches, you know, and like the higher...

Some of your higher altitude planes, they often had like really like cool looks, you know, like the SR-71 Blackbird or, you know, various strategic bombers and all. But then when you get to the U-2, which is a very high, it was, you know, a very high altitude spy plane, you know, it looks a little dumb and just has really long wings. But it's, you know, its altitude was its defense.

And in a sense, this is kind of like the inversion of that. Like its depth is its defense, and therefore it doesn't need to look crazy. It doesn't need to have a bunch of guns on it, or in this case, its various octopod defense mechanisms.

Now, their reproductive systems also speak to their isolation. And we see this in other organisms. We're going to discuss another one, I think, in the next episode. If you're thriving in an area where there's just you're basically in a desert, well, you're not going to run into potential mates as much either. I mean, you're not going to run into foes, but you're also not going to run into potential friends either.

So a female keeps multiple eggs in various states of development inside of her body, and she can also store sperm for extended periods of time as well, thus making the most out of these infrequent encounters with the opposite sex.

Furthermore, the mother doesn't stay with the eggs once they've been laid. According to a 2018 article by Shea et al. in Current Biology, the young here hatch as fully confident juveniles. So a newly hatched Dumbo octopod can immediately begin carrying on feeding and so forth like any adult.

Born ready. Yeah. So I love these guys. I mean, they're weird looking. They're definitely weird, but their weirdness is one of isolation and a casting off of defensive adaptations, speed, ink, camouflage, because they've adapted to live so deep. Not so deep that they can't be found by predators, but seemingly such predation is just far less common. However, it is stressed in some of the literature I was looking at that they do deter predators by ballooning up predators.

That's one thing that they kept. Like, they can balloon up their bodies and their umbrella-like arms to appear larger than they actually are. This, of course, is a common anti-predation feature. And so they've held on to that one. That's one that they, I guess it's not too costly from an evolutionary standpoint, and they can keep that one for when they need it. But in the case of this animal, that just sounds adorable. Look, I'm big and scary. Yeah, indeed. How big and scary could they end up looking?

Yeah, it seems like that's kind of like a last ditch defense mechanism. But for the most part, it's just I'm so deep, you're probably not going to find me. The odds are with me that you can't find me.

All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, but we're going to be back. We have more to discuss in our look at dark ocean predators. We're going to get back to a creature we mentioned in passing in the first episode, and I believe next episode is also going to be the one where I get to discuss one of the deep sea predators that a number of you have probably thought about. When are they going to talk about this one? Well, next episode is probably the episode.

In the meantime, yeah, write in. We'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture episode with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

so

Divorce can leave you feeling isolated, like you're stuck on an island with no direction. But you don't have to go through it alone. At Hello Divorce, we guide you step by step, offering everything from legal advice to financial planning so you can find your way back to solid ground. Start your divorce journey with the support you need at HelloDivorce.com because you deserve a better path forward. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft.

Developers like you are building the future, but you need the right tools to push what's possible. That's where Microsoft comes in. With GitHub Copilot, VS Code, Azure AI Foundry, and more. You have the tools to build your way and bring your ideas to life. You can build confidently, securely, and focus on creating the next big thing. Learn more at developer.microsoft.com slash AI. Microsoft. Yours to build.

Your stomach is a mess and you feel lousy. Something is just off, but you don't know what. Yeah, we get it. You've tried every fad diet and supplement under the sun and none of it worked. Here's the truth. Your gut's a mess and your body is letting you know. You're just too busy and you ignore the signs, making it worse. Viome gets straight to the point, analyzing your gut microbiome to give you a personalized health plan that actually works. Your gut is how your body processes everything that you consume. Stop ignoring the signs. It's time to do something real. Get Viome and fix your gut now. Call StarStarGut to get $50 off of

Today's episode is brought to you by USPS. I know, I know you've got your shipping game on lock, but did you know with USPS Ground Advantage service, it's like your shipment has a direct line to you.

You're in the loop the whole time. It leaves the dock, you know about it. It's on the road, boom, you know. And when it reaches your customer, you guessed it, you're in the know again. Here's the real game changer. It's one journey, one partner, total peace of mind. Check out USPS Ground Advantage service at usps.com slash in the know. Because if you know, you know.