Yi-Kai Tea recently returned from a 35-day expedition to explore the deep seas surrounding a new marine park in the Indian Ocean. They collected thousands of specimens.
JUANA ESTAS, HOST;
Dr Yi-Kai Tea loves to talk about fish. His social media handle is @KaiTheFishGuy. He recently joined a research expedition in the Indian Ocean, which involved all kinds of unusual creatures. There’s the cute, globular deep-sea batfish, the more terrifying lizards, and then the bony eel.
YI-KAI TEA: You know, one of our colleagues provided us with the etymology behind assfish. I, for the life of me, can’t remember because I was too busy laughing.
Summers: Dr. Tea, who is a biodiversity research fellow at the Australian Museum in Sydney, says the Indian Ocean expedition has found thousands of specimens. About a third of them may be new science, and both are surprising developments in the deep sea.
TEA: It’s funny to poke fun at these creatures, and it’s, you know, good to have a laugh, but these are things that have been around for thousands of years. They’ve been around, you know, way longer than us. They are the masters of the kingdom. You can’t, you know, live in 3,000 meters of water and not be the master of what you do. It’s just an inhospitable environment, and the fact that these creatures live there, because of their strength, thrive and make the most out of these habitats, that’s a feat I know, you know? So we can all laugh at the animals all we want, but it’s just that we deserve the respect we give to all animals equally.
SUMMERS: Well, Dr. Tea – aka @KaiTheFishGuy – recently spoke with Aaron Scott on Short Wave, NPR’s daily science podcast, where he offers a glimpse of ocean life three miles below the surface.
AARON SCOTT, BYLINE: Give us a little sense of what the environment is like there. I mean, the deep ocean compared to the coral reef ecosystems that you’re trying to study, what are the creatures that live there like, and what are some of the things that are adapted or evolved to live. in that space?
TEA: Among the main differences, of course, is the temperature. The water is really, really cold there. And the other differences would be light and pressure. So it’s not at all light there, and the water pressure is a lot higher than what you would have in the lower realm. But the animals that live there are really, really well suited to living in these environments. Because of the cold temperatures and because of the lack of food there, many animals have really, really low metabolic rates. So no – they’re not very active. I don’t swim much. But such righteous people live their lives either swimming through a column of water or sitting at the bottom of the sea. They have a lot of really big teeth that not only allow them to, you know, grab prey items, but make sure that whatever they catch doesn’t get away.
And to deal with water stress, a lot of their muscle density is really low. They are really gelatinous. They are really blobby. So the pressure keeps them in shape. But when you bring them to the surface, you will soon see them just sort of melt on the table. It’s just really gelatinous. Water – their flesh is truly aquatic.
SCOTT: Gelatinous animals with large teeth.
TEA: Yeah, and the lights too. Therefore, many animals are bioluminescent. Thus they bring forth their light. And bioluminescence in animals can arise in two ways, either intrinsically, as they actually produce light in the chemicals that innately produce it, or they do it symbiotically with bacteria that produce light that are in the house. called special photographic organs.
So it’s really interesting, actually. You have, you know, all these creatures going down there that can produce light, but they produce different colored lights, and they produce lights in different ways. They produce lights in various places. But they do all kinds of things for the same thing, either to camouflage or to communicate or to attract prey.
SCOTT: It sounds like fish people.
THEA: It is. And it’s really – I mean, look, I say, Aaron, just like the things you read in the books, right? I seem to have known about my lights all my life. I know, you know, fishermen, and all this is light. But seeing them in person and holding them in your hand and looking at the photographs, I mean, these are amazing creatures. The photos are so beautiful. They’re like – you know, very bright organs. and they make purple and blue and red lights. And it’s just, you know, stunning. Yes. You really know the experience of life.
SCOTT: Somewhere, like you said, it’s like Christmas dragging…
THEA: Yeah.
SCOTT: … This net went up. Can you tell us a little about some of the favorite critters among all the things you guys have pulled out? What does it highlight for you?
TEA: We found a bunch of new potential new species. We came upon a few, you know, exciting finds, such as vipers and pelican eels and tripod fish; things you know, you read about all your life, but you never see yourself. And these were just, you know, my childhood loves that I made known to me, you know, mostly when I was 10, but I never thought in my dreams that I would see and hold a person.
SCOTT: The belt-deep batfish really seemed to be making some waves on social media.
THEA: Right? Yes. Oh, where do I even begin?
SCOTTA: They appear like ravioli or pierogies or dumplings.
TEA: To me, it looked like a deflated dumpling soup. But these are sometimes called under-ashed fish, and are very flat. And if you look under the body, their fins are modified into almost small feet, and they use it to generally crawl through the sea floor. So these are with, you know, very poor dissipation mechanisms. They move at a glacial pace. But they have immense distributions. I say that some of these species are found across the equator. Like, how do they disperse? But how is he getting, he says, across the seas? And are they really one species?
So these are the kind of questions we really want to answer, right? We want to know more about not only what these fish are, but how they get here, and why they live here? And do you know this population that is found in Cocos Island – or are they the same ones that I found in Japan, for example, or in Asia? These are all questions that you know we really want to answer.
SCOTT: So dozens of scientists spent 35 days on this ship. You all pulled out, I’m guessing, like thousands of actual specimens. Only hard work and…
THEA: So much work.
SCOTT. What, I say, does it matter to you that we throw all this work and all these resources into this life?
TEA: You know, I think it’s really, really important, you know, to know first of all, you know, we live in a world with very limited resources. And the things that live in these places are not – they are not immune, and they are not impervious to the threats that come from the shoals, you know, the shorter counterparts in the coral reefs, right? And in order to protect these things, you must know what they are first. So the first step in any biodiversity sampling is to understand what’s living there, you know, and then to put names on things that don’t have names.
It helps us to understand what is going on here in time. So not only the research that’s been done today, but also the research that’s being conducted in the future, you know, to reach future generations and other scientists around the world and better understand our world collectively through the materials that we are in order to better understand what lives in our world, to better protect it we can
Summers: Dr. Yi-Kai Tea, or KaiTheFishGuy, speaking with co-host Aaron Scott on NPR’s daily science podcast, Shortwave.
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