Bright sunshine lit the dramatic peaks around Hornsund today, where we made a landing at a historic trapper’s cabin and hiked along the beach below a towering seabird cliff. All seemed well with the world as we enjoyed the last day of the season on Spitsbergen, but far below, in a realm of eternal night beneath the midnight sun, strange creatures lurked and terrible deeds were afoot.
Two hundred and thirty feet below the surface of the sound, our ROV cruised thorough this world of darkness and bone-chilling cold, discovering an amazing wealth of life thriving in this harsh environment. Strange fish rested on the bottom, shrimp and small lobsters crawled by or zipped overhead, unusual tubeworms extended their feathery mouths and fed from the current while transparent arrow worms hovered nearby. One of the weirdest animals we found was this beautiful opisthobranch mollusk, a relative of the more familiar nudibranchs as well as common garden snails and slugs. I should say it appears to be an opisthobranch, though it has some very unusual features such as the fringe of tentacles under its head (on the right end) and it is certainly a species unfamiliar to me; it may well be an undescribed species.
Not far away, the ROV witnessed a moment of high drama. I was carefully focusing on a small anemone when a hapless amphipod (a tiny crustacean) happened along, cruising over the soft bottom sediments. In a moment of carelessness it brushed against one of the anemone’s tentacles and was instantly snatched up and stuffed into the horrible maw of the predator! This brief vignette became one of the highlights of our evening’s recap as everyone assembled in the lounge thrilled to see this stark evidence of nature’s darker side; a spectacle comparable to lions pulling down zebra on the plains of the Serengeti.
Though perhaps these invertebrates are not truly as compelling as large land predators like lions or polar bears, it really is a thrill to witness the processes of life in action, particularly when the images come from a hitherto invisible world at the bottom of Svalbard’s icy fjords.
Two hundred and thirty feet below the surface of the sound, our ROV cruised thorough this world of darkness and bone-chilling cold, discovering an amazing wealth of life thriving in this harsh environment. Strange fish rested on the bottom, shrimp and small lobsters crawled by or zipped overhead, unusual tubeworms extended their feathery mouths and fed from the current while transparent arrow worms hovered nearby. One of the weirdest animals we found was this beautiful opisthobranch mollusk, a relative of the more familiar nudibranchs as well as common garden snails and slugs. I should say it appears to be an opisthobranch, though it has some very unusual features such as the fringe of tentacles under its head (on the right end) and it is certainly a species unfamiliar to me; it may well be an undescribed species.
Not far away, the ROV witnessed a moment of high drama. I was carefully focusing on a small anemone when a hapless amphipod (a tiny crustacean) happened along, cruising over the soft bottom sediments. In a moment of carelessness it brushed against one of the anemone’s tentacles and was instantly snatched up and stuffed into the horrible maw of the predator! This brief vignette became one of the highlights of our evening’s recap as everyone assembled in the lounge thrilled to see this stark evidence of nature’s darker side; a spectacle comparable to lions pulling down zebra on the plains of the Serengeti.
Though perhaps these invertebrates are not truly as compelling as large land predators like lions or polar bears, it really is a thrill to witness the processes of life in action, particularly when the images come from a hitherto invisible world at the bottom of Svalbard’s icy fjords.
