What lies beneath the Aussie sea

TWO-AND-HALF miles below the ocean near Australia, there is crushing pressure, total darkness and a collection of some of the strangest creatures on the planet.

Scientists haven’t heavily explored these areas. Recently, an international team of scientists and a government research organisation spent a month trawling the ocean floor off the Australian coast trying to figure out what lives down there.

For scientists, the finds are beginning to shed light on the dramatic evolution of creatures in extreme environments. For the rest of us, the photos of the findings offer something different: seawater-scented nightmare fuel.

For example, the spiny red crab. It’s one of the few brightly coloured things the scientists pulled out of Australia’s eastern abyss.

Although there is a clear advantage in being covered in dozens of thorny spikes, many of the creatures the scientists found were sans spikes. In fact, they could be summed up with one adjective: gelatinous.

For example, the investigators are trying to determine whether the coffin-fish they found is a new species. It uses a “fishing rod tipped with a fluffy bait on top of its head”.

Another unorthodox eater found was a cookie-cutter shark. It has been documented before, but not in the areas where the marine research vessel travelled in the past month. And there’s the “faceless” fish, which hasn’t been seen by humans in more than 140 years, according to the researchers.

Raising these creatures from the depths took some advanced technology to overcome the environmental hurdles.

The scientists pulled up more than 1 000 sea creatures, which will now be studied and catalogued.