A team of marine scientists set their sights on a relatively unexplored part of the ocean near New Zealand, known as the Bounty Trough. This region, largely untouched by scientific study, holds a wealth of untapped knowledge.
Over the course of three weeks aboard the Tangaroa, they delved as deep as 3 miles (4,800 meters), where they collected deep-sea species. They gathered nearly 1,800 samples of fish, squids, mollusks, and corals, potentially unveiling species never before seen by human eyes.
Dr. Daniel Moore, who manages the expedition, said they didn’t know much about this part of the ocean before. They are part of a group called Ocean Census, determined to find 100,000 new species in the next ten years. Sorting out and describing the new creatures will take another three weeks.
They found one creature that looks like a star or a sea anemone, but they’re not sure what it is yet. Dr. Michela Mitchell from the Queensland Museum Network believes it might be a new type of deep-sea coral.
“Even more excitingly, it could be a whole new group outside of the octocoral. If it is, that is a significant find for the deep sea and gives us a much clearer picture of the planet’s unique biodiversity,” Mitchell said in the statement.
They also found a new type of fish called an eelpout, which surprised them because finding new fish is rare. They used different tools, such as nets and cameras, to collect samples.
Despite our extensive knowledge about the ocean, it remains a vast, largely uncharted frontier. The oceans teem with millions of species, yet scientists have only managed to describe a minuscule fraction of them. Each new species discovered, like the potential deep-sea coral and the eelpout, provides a fresh piece to the puzzle of our planet’s rich biodiversity.