I’m gonna say it I think deep sea animals are beautiful and incredible and very neat and I know that’s not an unpopular thought like many many people agree but I don’t at all hold the sentiment that they are terrifying and grotesque and anything else like that.
The popular jokes like “we need to leave whatever is in the ocean down there I’ll take my chances in space” are funny I love those jokes but truly
When I see a photo of one of the more supposedly horrifying fish from the deep I am mystified I am filled with wonder and even adoration an that’s all
idk they are just truly amazing.
They go down…..so deep…..they just live down there…with all of their teeth. They don’t have a care for or a thought for us or anything else up here. They’re just down there glowing and swimming and eating.
Amazing.
They’re not scary they’re just so vastly different and their existences are so vastly different from anything we can comprehend. I can’t fathom what life would be like down there.
I love them. They are animals, same as anything else. Not scary. Just incredible.
So my introduction to Deep-Sea creatures was different than most people’s in that my grandparents lived right near the Monterey Bay Aquarium and I have many fond memories of going there with them right as the MBARI deep-sea rover program was getting underway.
For a while there, they were discovering a dozen new species per dive, and couldn’t tell people fast, loud or lovingly enough. There were even live veiwings of the MBARI feed visible at the aquarium, along with monthly recaps of everything they’d seen in the previously unexplored Monterey canyon. You pretty much had to make a blood sacrifice to the dark gods to get tickets, but I remember sitting in a completely packed auditorium as someone with more than one doctorate burst onto the stage to thunderous applause and shrieks of delight as though he was there to sing the national anthem at the superbowl instead of about to show us 40 new invertebretes.
So where I think a lot of people were first exposed to things like Anglerfish and marine worms via “ooh look how creepy these things are!” my first exposure to them was watching a marine biologist literally jumping up and down on stage with excitement , voice full of love and delight as he showed us, seen for the first time on camera and not dead in a net, this lovely creature:
The video we saw was silent, in which the Medusa slowly turned toward then away from the camera, elegantly corkscrewing up through the slow updraft current. She was magnificent, graceful and absolutely wondrous.
“Isn’t she the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” he asked, tears in his eyes.
And to thirteen-year-old-me? Yes, yes she was. She still is.
She’s from a very, very different world than here, and her kind are probably unfathomably ancient, and to be able to catch even the briefest of glimpses into a life so completely different than ours is such, such a privlege.
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gallusrostromegalus: vampireapologist: I’m gonna say it I think deep sea animals are beautiful and...
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