Scientists fish for answers

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Tags: discovery, marine research, QBI, summer-2010

The Deep Australia project team are studying mysterious creatures living in the darkest depths of our oceans

Queensland Brain Institute scientists have used high-tech equipment to capture underwater creatures at depths not documented before.

Using deep-sea cameras and instrument platforms new to Australia, prehistoric six-gilled sharks, giant oil fish, swarms of crustaceans and many unidentified fish were caught on camera in July 1,400m below sea level at Osprey Reef, 350km northeast of Cairns.

The team, led by Professor Justin Marshall, captured the creatures using low-light sensitive, remote-controlled cameras, which sat on the sea floor. The Australian Research Council funded the equipment that was built at The Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institute in Florida.

“As well as understanding life at the surface, we need to plunge off the walls of Osprey to describe the deep-sea life that lives down to 2000m. We simply do not know what life is down there and our cameras can now record the behaviour and life in Australia’s largest biosphere, the deep-sea,” Professor Marshall said.

Scientists working on the Deep Australia project also collected amazing footage of the Nautilus, a relative of the squid or octopus that still lives in a shell as they have done for millions of years.

Researchers measured these “living fossils” to find out more about their biology before returning them to sea.

“Learning more about these creatures’ primitive eyes and brain could help neuroscientists to better understand human vision,” research student Andy Dunstan said.

Professor Marshall said most of our knowledge on how nerve cells functioned and communicated was first pioneered through work on giant squid nerve cells.

“We are now returning to these original model systems, both for their own intrinsic interest and also to better understand brain disorders which lead to conditions such as epilepsy,” he said.

In September, the scientists travelled to the Peruvian Trench off South America where they filmed and captured deep-sea species 2,000m below the surface.

By Anna Bednarek

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