New Jellyfish Identified Using Only ROV Video
A picture of the newly discovered comb jelly taken by the DEEP Discoverer ROV.
NOAA
In a first-of-its-kind identification, scientists recently discovered a new species of jellyfish after observing it purely via high-definition video footage.
Using a remotely operated vehicle, scientists spotted a small, gelatinous blob in an underwater canyon near Puerto Rico in 2015. But it took years — and the breakdown of a scientific stigma — for the enigmatic floater to be identified as Duobrachium sparksae, a new species of comb jelly.
“Video identification can be controversial,” Allen Collins, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who worked on the expedition, tells The Guardian. “For example, some insect species descriptions have been done with low-quality imagery and some scientists have said they don’t think that’s a good way of doing things.”
But thanks to its cutting-edge ROV called Deep Discoverer, NOAA was able to take ultra-high-definition imagery of the creature nearly 13,000 feet below sea level and take it back to the lab for a full analysis — and the scientific community has accepted the findings.
An illustration of a comb jelly.
NOAA/Nicholas Bezio
“For this discovery, we didn’t get any pushback,” Collins says. “It was a really good example of how to do it the right way with video.”
Deep Discoverer spotted a trio of the new species engaged in an odd behavior: All three anchored themselves to the seafloor with two long tentacles, moving up and down like a hot air balloon.
“It was a beautiful and unique organism,” Mike Ford, a NOAA Fisheries scientist, tells The Guardian. “We collected high-definition video and described what we saw. We went through the historical knowledge of ctenophores and it seemed clear this was a new species and genus as well. We then worked to place it in the tree of life properly.”
The team has not collected any Duobrachium sparksae, so instead of a physical specimen, the ROV video will be placed in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Additional research on the new comb jellies will be part of future expeditions.