Thousands of strange creatures found deep in ocean

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091122/ap_on_sc/us_marine_census

"NEW ORLEANS – The creatures living in the depths of the ocean are as weird and outlandish as the creations in a Dr. Seuss book: tentacled transparent sea cucumbers, primitive "dumbos" that flap ear-like fins, and tubeworms that feed on oil deposits.

A report released Sunday recorded 17,650 species living below 656 feet, the point where sunlight ceases. The findings were the latest update on a 10-year census of marine life."

Check out:

http://www.coml.org

http://www.coml.org/imagegallery/

It's not so much that these are anything new.  Scientists have known about most of these creatures since the Challenger Expedition in the 1870's.   I guess the Census of Marine Life simply put out a press release for their deep see image gallery. They are by the way, very nice images but fairly limited.  Of the 17,650 species they have a grand total of 57 images.  I'm a little disappointed they didn't have pictures of more bathypelagic fishes like viperfish and deep sea anglers.

By far the coolest COML project going on right now, is their attempt to catalog historic species occurrences and abundances using old fishing records (History of Marine Animal Populations)  http://www.hmapcoml.org/

For those interested in white sharks, their Tagging of Pacific Predators http://www.topp.org/ project is really cool.

http://www.topp.org/species/white_shark

Cool links!  Thanks for sharing guys.

The images at coml.org are cool as hell.  Love that abyssobenthic ctenophore, #11.  And the Christmas Tree Worm, #...27?  OMG.

Thanks AHO.