Beautiful video. Just for the record, this animal is not new. The genus Tomopteris is known since 1825. Is addressed in each marine biology course as the poster child example of marine evolution in action. A worm that wants to be a brine shrimp and does not need to dig a burrow at all.
What changed is the technology. Most contractile animals are very difficult to measure. This includes tens thousands of species of molluscs, worms or jellyfishes that previously required complicated tricks to drug them alive
Why we would want to got a slug drunk before to kill them? to remove any pain in the process, so is preserved in a totally relaxed state
Is a pain in the ass for any researcher studying this animals to locate things like the penis in a contracted and distorted worm (Without this parts you can't classify them even at genus level). If this technique is able to draw the inner organs (on its real shape and size, and placed where they need to be, according to the rest of the glands and organs), each malacologist in the planet will cheer in relief
These little guys have no conception of light, the sea floor, or the existence of a surface. Any aliens we could cross paths with are probably more relatable.
I assume they have some conception of light, they have eyes[0], and emit bioluminescent mucus. I'm assuming that their conception is "light = danger".
Although I can't find any info if they're one of the blind species of polychaetes. This paper[1] implies they have photoreceptors (I think, I'm a layman who only knows some of the words in it), but more importantly, it just gave me a name for my next synthwave band: Tentacular Cirri.
There seems to be good reason to think that most aliens inhabit eternal darkness in a ocean underneath a global ice cap.
"New research by scientists from NASA and Japan’s Osaka University suggests that rogue planets – worlds that drift through space untethered to a star – far outnumber planets that orbit stars."
GP was precise in their phrasing: "aliens we could cross paths with". It would be much harder to actually meet or communicate with aliens that live in a dark ocean on a rogue planet than it would be for other aliens. ;)
That would limit the available energy inputs though, miniscule solar radiation, miniscule tidal forces, so unless you've got active plate tectonics or radionuclide decay, it's all going to become ice, presumably?
There's some truth to that. Europa, Enceladus, and other places are more than frozen ice balls because they get tidal heating from orbiting a gas giant. Even so, there are probably vast amounts of rogue gas giants between the stars. The very largest of these objects are known as brown dwarfs.
Why? I would imagine life on Jupiter’s moons might be something similar to these creatures, for example.
And our own solar system is the only place where we realistically have the slightest chance of physically crossing paths with aliens for many millennia.
Prone to artifacts, but smart idea to solve a very old problem with gelatinous animals. really difficult to preserve because they burst at surface. Also very good to turn information to digital, so it can be sent long-distances. This technique will prove to be very useful when we explore Europa under the ice, for sure
Is not only about tomopterids, the deep sea siphonophora are incredible. Some have a few floaters shaped like space ships but made of gelatin. Other are a 'culthuesque' ball with tentacles. Avoiding us to touch the animals is a plus (the group is known to make very strong venoms and deep sea will have a lot that we still didn't know).
This is awesome, but this phrasing is FN brutal - This is what it feels like to be abducted, I would imagine:
>>>"beach ball-sized chamber so that an animal is simultaneously contained and yet swimming freely in an environment nearly identical to its natural home.
>>>..The RAD-2 contains a device that collects and pulverizes tissue samples from the organisms and sucks these samples through a hole where the samples are hit with preservative and deposited on one of 14 filters for later analysis."
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The interesting thing is that if it uses the antennae to detect ammonia and other chemicals as signatures of its food, a few questions would be;
Could we use the same sensor types as these gossamer and other sea creatures to develop a better life-detecting signature for chemical indicator mixtures of what we may find in atmospheres?
Can these things have a fully 3D spherical awareness of their environments so they know where the food is based on the flows of the trace chemicals it smells - its it following the thread of a scent to the food?
If anyone finds this an interesting idea, you should try blackwater diving. It’s one of my favorite things to do it’s absolutely like being an outer space finding weird aliens. You don’t have to dive very deep and it’s super easy to pay attention to the light so you don’t get lost.
It looks like it is almost the opposite of cave diving [1]:
> As the name suggests, blackwater dives are carried out at night. They are typically conducted over extremely deep water. Before the dive, powerful lights are hung beneath the boat, simulating moonlight and attracting creatures from far and wide.
> Each diver is individually tethered to the boat via a rope that’s clipped to their BCD. Divers descend along their line (usually no deeper than 20m/66ft) then simply hang out and watch the show. Not all operators will tether divers to the line – some will have a set distance from the light that divers must stay within. This will depend on local conditions such as currents.
