WEBVTT

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The deep sea is a dark environment and it's a real surprise, I think,

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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.

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It's got reds and pinks and yellows and purples.

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It's a surprisingly beautiful place, especially when you think about how harsh that environment is.

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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.

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So I never get bored of looking at it.

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When we go and do these explorations, we bring our own light source with us.

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The ROV is equipped with a bank of lights that is shining white light onto our

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surroundings and so we then can detect the color that the animals living there don't see.

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So because we are visual animals, I think we interpret whenever we see color as having some important meaning.

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And that isn't necessarily the case in all situations.

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Animals don't necessarily want a particular color.

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They are made of particular molecules that absorb light in different ways

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and the wavelengths of light that they absorb leave only some wavelengths to be reflected back.

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And it's the reflection of what's left is the color that we perceive.

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In the deep sea, those colors may be a product of what they have eaten.

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They may have defensive functions, so many of them are associated with some kind of a toxin or a defensive metabolite.

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You think of sponges. We see some very colorful sponges in yellows and greens.

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Those chemicals that are giving that color may be the same chemicals that are making it distasteful to other animals.

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So there's a lot of reasons that an animal may have a pigment that gives it a color that

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have nothing to do with our visual perception of that color.

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So the other part of seeing color is what our eyes are able to detect.

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And our eyes aren't able to detect all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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We see from the reds and oranges and yellows to the greens, the blues, and the purples.

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We can't see in the longer wavelengths, infrareds, or the shorter wavelengths, the ultraviolets.

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However, there are some animals that are able to perceive those sorts of wavelengths and so

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they may have a totally different visual spectrum than we do.

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So the other end of the equation is because there's no light, a lot of the animals

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in the deep sea are actually sensing their environment in a different way.

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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

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or we've heard about the lateral lines that are on fish and these are able to detect motion in the water.

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We also have a lot of taste, basically, or smelling of the water and so there will be

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receptors that are on these antennae that can detect molecules. It's a form of scent.

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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.

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Wouldn't it be fascinating to get into the head of that animal and try to see from its perspective?

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And is it just a dark environment that it's kind of feeling its way around and

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sniffing its way around or is it capable of seeing some minute bits of light from

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all these different organisms that are around it producing a little bit of bioluminescence.

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Or, who knows, maybe the brain works in a way that it can interpret all of the mechano-vibrations

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that are coming through the water column and maybe it can interpret that in a visual way.

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I don't know, but it would be fascinating to find out.