The deep sea is a dark environment and it's a real surprise, I think,
for anyone who's looking at it for the first time when you turn those lights on then suddenly "Whoa." It's a really colorful place.
It's got reds and pinks and yellows and purples.
It's a surprisingly beautiful place, especially when you think about how harsh that environment is.
It's dark, it's high pressure, it's cold and yet it's got a true aesthetic beauty and that's one of the things I find really special about it.
So I never get bored of looking at it.
When we go and do these explorations, we bring our own light source with us.
The ROV is equipped with a bank of lights that is shining white light onto our
surroundings and so we then can detect the color that the animals living there don't see.
So because we are visual animals, I think we interpret whenever we see color as having some important meaning.
And that isn't necessarily the case in all situations.
Animals don't necessarily want a particular color.
They are made of particular molecules that absorb light in different ways
and the wavelengths of light that they absorb leave only some wavelengths to be reflected back.
And it's the reflection of what's left is the color that we perceive.
In the deep sea, those colors may be a product of what they have eaten.
They may have defensive functions, so many of them are associated with some kind of a toxin or a defensive metabolite.
You think of sponges. We see some very colorful sponges in yellows and greens.
Those chemicals that are giving that color may be the same chemicals that are making it distasteful to other animals.
So there's a lot of reasons that an animal may have a pigment that gives it a color that
have nothing to do with our visual perception of that color.
So the other part of seeing color is what our eyes are able to detect.
And our eyes aren't able to detect all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.
We see from the reds and oranges and yellows to the greens, the blues, and the purples.
We can't see in the longer wavelengths, infrareds, or the shorter wavelengths, the ultraviolets.
However, there are some animals that are able to perceive those sorts of wavelengths and so
they may have a totally different visual spectrum than we do.
So the other end of the equation is because there's no light, a lot of the animals
in the deep sea are actually sensing their environment in a different way.
They're not using visual cues and so a lot of the animals that we see, you'll see they have these extremely long antennae
or we've heard about the lateral lines that are on fish and these are able to detect motion in the water.
We also have a lot of taste, basically, or smelling of the water and so there will be
receptors that are on these antennae that can detect molecules. It's a form of scent.
The answer is I don't know what the deep sea looks like to another deep sea animal, but wouldn't it be fascinating to know.
Wouldn't it be fascinating to get into the head of that animal and try to see from its perspective?
And is it just a dark environment that it's kind of feeling its way around and
sniffing its way around or is it capable of seeing some minute bits of light from
all these different organisms that are around it producing a little bit of bioluminescence.
Or, who knows, maybe the brain works in a way that it can interpret all of the mechano-vibrations
that are coming through the water column and maybe it can interpret that in a visual way.
I don't know, but it would be fascinating to find out.