It’s called Deepstaria Enigmatica, but what is it?
A very cool video of a mysterious creature filmed during deep-sea drilling 5000 feet below sea level near the United Kingdom on April 25, has created much clamor amongst scientists. Theories about the species of this animal ranged from a jellyfish to an unknown marine version of the Loch Ness monster to a whale placenta. Mind you, a new undiscovered species would also be a likely conclusion- especially given that ocean depths remain one of the least explored and understood places, in fact we know more about the moon than our own oceans. Click below to see the video and to find out what it is.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlwvRURK2eg&feature=related[/youtube]
Experts like Southern Cross University marine biology lecturer Dr. Daniel Bucher, believed that this creature resembled “a very unusual shape deep sea jellyfish”, the sex organs give it away , he said. Others thought that the creature was a Stygiomedusa Gigantea jellyfish which can grow up to six meters in length and has only been spotted 114 times in 110 years.
But alas the verdict has been finally reached, the species is in fact a (collapsed) Deepstaria Enigmatica, a rare jellyfish species that resembles a translucent satin sheet or “lava lamp”.
This species was first captured on camera in 1967 (below) and described very similarly to the species caught in the video.
Images from DeepSea News
Author: Linda Pappagallo
Linda's love for nature started when at the age of eight she discovered, with her dog, a magical river in the valley of a mountainous region in Lebanon. For four years Linda and her dog explored along the river, until one day she saw construction scrapers pushing rock boulders down the valley to make way for new construction sites. The rubble came crashing into the river destroying her little paradise, and her pathetic reaction was to shout at the mechanic monsters. Of course that was not enough to stop the destructive processes. As she continued to observe severe environmental degradation across the different places she lived in the Middle East and Africa, these terrible images remained impressed in her mind. However, environmental issues where not her first love. Her initial academic and career choices veered towards sustainable economic development, with particular interest in savings led microfinance schemes. Nevertheless, through experience, she soon realized a seemingly obvious but undervalued concept. While humans can somewhat defend themselves from the greed of other humans, nature cannot. Also nature, the environment, is the main “system” that humans depend on, not economics. These conclusions changed her path and she is now studying a Masters in...
