Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
ALIENS OF THE DEEP
Just like Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise, producer Orla Doherty boldly went where few people have gone before in the episode entitled The Deep, which ventures to some of the least explored places on Earth. Despite 60 per cent of our planet being covered by ocean more than a mile deep (at its deepest it’s almost seven miles) whole species of creatures living there remain unnamed, many more are still undiscovered and vast areas uncharted. ‘I felt like an astronaut down there, like I’d visited lots of planets without ever leaving Earth,’ says Orla. ‘So much of what we saw down there is extraordinary looking, such as the see-through glass squid which uses its transparency as a protective camouflage and has large eyes, enabling it to pick up every last photon of light in the gloom.’
Orla and the team in her tiny submersible – a pilot and a camera operator – used state- of-the-art low-light cameras developed to film lions hunting in Africa at night to capture footage of a shoal of Humboldt squid 1,000 strong off the coast of Chile hunting lanternfish, so called because they light up. At 2m long, the Humboldt is one of the biggest squid in the sea. ‘They’ve been known to attack divers and put underwater cameras out of action. They went for the lights and cameras on our sub and I was worried they were going to start ripping cables but thankfully they didn’t,’ says Orla.
What she captured was behaviour never seen before. ‘The cameras were vital as we were going into a world where the sun doesn’t shine and we had to be as unobtrusive as possible,’ she says. ‘ The Humboldts grab their prey by extending their two long tentacles in less than a second. Between 100 and 200 suckers on the club- like ends of the tentacles are rimmed with razor-sharp teeth so nothing is likely to escape – then a sharp, parrot-like beak rips into the flesh.
‘If they can’t find fish they can turn on each other, and we filmed them taking part in this incredibly violent tug- of-war, during which one squid had another in its tentacles. Spanish fishermen call them “diablo rojo”, red devils, because they flash red and white when they hunt. They combine speed with intelligence, grace, movement and violence, and it was all there right in front of me,’ says Orla.
Without the weapons the Humboldt squid has at its disposal, many deep sea creatures have evolved different methods of procuring food. The flap- jack surface octopusof the hoversmud off just the above Pacific the coast of the USA, delicately sifting it for worms, while the feather starfish, one of more than 1,800 species of starfish that live as deep as 3½ miles below the surface, uses its arms to filter food from passing currents and then passes it down to its mouth.
To get footage at depths of more than half a mile, Orla and her team used remote- controlled cameras capable of withstanding the extreme pressure at these depths, and one of these discovered a new species of fish five miles deep in the western Pacific. It’s since been named the ethereal snailfish, a pale pink creature with a body that waves about like wet tissue paper, as if it has no structure. ‘It survives at those depths because of special chemicals in its body,’ says Orla. If there’s a delicate beauty to the ethereal snailfish, other creatures of the deep are far more forbidding. The fangtooth has the biggest teeth for its body size of any fish and looks truly ferocious, even though it’s only 16cm long. ‘He’s your worst nightmare, the king of the midnight zone,’ shudders Orla. ‘Its jaws are filled with huge teeth and its bottom two front teeth are so long it has sockets on either side of its brain to accommodate them when its mouth is closed. He’s a real horror.’ There was, however, a phenomenon so extraordinary in the Gulf of Mexico it even trumped the fangtooth – a methane volcano. ‘We saw a large bubble the size of a basketball rising in the water,’ says Orla. ‘And very quickly giant bubbles surrounded us. Methane can occur in its solid state at low temperatures in the sea bed, but when it changes back to gas it triggers volcanoes in the mud which erupt in huge bubbles. It was probably the most remarkable experience of my life.’
The team also encountered the Dumbo octopus, so called because it has fins that resemble flapping ears, which can be found almost four miles below the surface of the ocean, the deepest of any octopus in the world. ‘But sometimes it was a creature’s behaviour that was most surprising,’ says Orla. ‘We encountered a fish called a sea toad which actually toddles off along the ocean floor, using its fins as feet, although it can swim if it wants to just like any other fish. That was remarkable. Seeing a fish suddenly starting to walk is just not normal!’
Blue Planet II begins on Sunday 29 October at 8pm on BBC1.