Deep Sea Creatures Surfacing!!

[Vulcan59]

Seems like something is happening "down there".

Thousands of jumbo flying squid — aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles — have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, spooking scuba divers and washing up dead on tourist-packed beaches.

The carnivorous calamari, which can grow up to 100 pounds, came up from the depths last week and swarms of them roughed up unsuspecting divers. Some divers report tentacles enveloping their masks and yanking at their cameras and gear.

Stories of too-close encounters with the alien-like cephalopods have chased many veteran divers out of the water and created a whirlwind of excitement among the rest, who are torn between their personal safety and the once-in-a-lifetime chance to swim with the deep-sea giants.

The so-called Humboldt squid are native to the deep waters off Mexico, where they have been known to attack humans and are nicknamed "red devils" for their rust-red coloring and mean streak. Those who dive with them there chum the water with bait and sometimes get in a metal cage or wear chain mail to avoid being lashed by tentacles.

"I wouldn't go into the water with them for the same reason I wouldn't walk into a pride of lions on the Serengeti," said Mike Bear, a local diver. "For all I know, I'm missing the experience of a lifetime."

The squid are too deep to bother swimmers and surfers, but many longtime divers say they are staying out of the surf until the sea creatures clear out. Yet other divers, including Shandra Magill, couldn't resist the chance to see the squid up close.

On a recent night, Magill watched in awe as a dozen squid with doleful, expressive eyes circled her group, tapping and patting the divers and gently bumping them before dashing away.

One especially large squid suspended itself motionless in the water about three feet away and peered at her closely, its eyes rolling, before it vanished into the black. A shimmering incandescence rippled along its body, almost as if it were communicating through its skin.

But the next night, things were different: A large squid surprised Magill by hitting her from behind and grabbing at her with its arms, pulling her sideways in the water. The powerful creature ripped her buoyancy hose away from her chest and knocked away her light.

When Magill recovered, she didn't know which direction was up and at first couldn't find the hose to help her stay afloat as she surfaced. The squid was gone.

"I just kicked like crazy. The first thing you think of is, 'Oh my gosh, I don't know if I'm going to survive this. If that squid wanted to hurt me, it would have," she said.

Other divers have reported squid pulling at their masks and gear and roughing them up.

Roger Uzun, a veteran scuba diver and amateur underwater videographer, swam with a swarm of the creatures for about 20 minutes and said they appeared more curious than aggressive. The animals taste with their tentacles, he said, and seemed to be touching him and his wet suit to determine if he was edible.

"As soon as we went underwater and turned on the video lights, there they were. They would ram into you, they kept hitting the back of my head," he said.

"One got ahold of the video light head and yanked on it for two or three seconds and he was actually trying to take the video light with him," said Uzun, who later posted a 3-minute video with his underwater footage on YouTube. "It almost knocked the video camera out of my hands."

Scientists aren't sure why the squid, which generally live in deep, tropical waters off Mexico and Central America, are swarming off the Southern California coast — but they are concerned.

In recent years, small numbers have been spotted from California to Sitka, Alaska — an alarming trend that scientists believe could be caused by anything from global warming to a shortage of food or a decline in the squid's natural predators.

In 2005, a similar invasion off San Diego delighted fishermen and, in 2002, thousands of jumbo flying squid washed up on the beaches here. That year, workers removed 12 tons of dead and dying squid.

This summer, the wayward squid have also been hauled up by fisherman in waters off Orange County, just north of San Diego.

Research suggests the squid may have established a year-round population off California at depths of 300 to 650 feet, said Nigella Hillgarth, executive director of the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Divers this summer have been encountering them at about 60 to 80 feet down, they said.

Swarms off the coast — and the subsequent die-offs — may occur when their prey moves to shallow waters and the squid follow, and then get trapped and confused in the surf, said Hillgarth, who saw a dying squid on the beach last weekend.

"It was an amazing privilege to touch a creature like that and see how amazingly beautiful it was," she said. "They have these wonderful eyes. ... They look all-seeing, all-knowing."

That's the kind of description that pulls veteran divers such as Raleigh Moody back to the pitch-black water, despite the danger.

"My usual dive buddy, he didn't want to come out," said Moody, as he prepared for a night dive with another friend. "There are some divers (who) just don't want to deal with it and there are some like me that, until they hear of something bad happening, I'm going to be an idiot and go back in the water."

And this came right after a report of a basking shark that washed ashore on Long Island on 15th July.

 

[spyraal]

It is amazing what creatures inhabit the deep waters! Also i find the comment "They have these wonderful eyes. ... They look all-seeing, all-knowing" quite amazing, too.
Who knows what the world feels like for a Humboldt squid?


Here is a picture of this particular species:

:)

 

[mamadrama]

And then there's the mysterious glob that's floating off the coast of Alaska

 

[1984]

It is amazing what creatures inhabit the deep waters! Also i find the comment "They have these wonderful eyes. ... They look all-seeing, all-knowing" quite amazing, too.
Who knows what the world feels like for a Humboldt squid?


Here is a picture of this particular species:

:)

And SOTT carried this article a few days back after San Diego had the offshore earthquake.

 

[Vulcan59]

Here is another, reported sometime ago.

A HARMLESS ‘sea monster’ was spotted recently at Eastern Beach, having washed ashore at high tide.

Local residents first noticed the strange ‘creature’ amongst seaweed at the southernmost end of the beach.

“It had writhing tentacles, each with pipi-like molluscs attached at the ends,” says resident Janine Robinson, who sent in her pictures to the Times.

“Sadly it slowly started to die as the sun and wind dried it out.

“MAF identified the monster as a cluster of goose barnacles. Goose barnacles are crustations, like prawns or crabs that attach themselves on to ocean-going flotsam. The tentacles extend from the shell-like casings and attach themselves to floating objects.”

Goose barnacles are not commonly seen in coastal or inshore waters, says MAF.

 

[Beau]

And then there's the mysterious glob that's floating off the coast of Alaska

Time has published an article detailing the mysterious 'blob' as an algae bloom:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090718/us_time/08599191151700

A group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black.

But what was it? An oil slick? Some sort of immense, amorphous organism adrift in some of the planet's most remote waters? Maybe a worrisome sign of global climate change? Or was it something insidious and, perhaps, even carnivorous like the man-eating jello from the old Steve McQueen movie that inspired the Alaskan phenomenon's nickname? (Read Richard Corliss' review of The Thing, a sci-fi film set in the Arctic.)

The hunters got word to the U.S. Coast Guard, which immediately sent two spill response experts to fly over the mass, which looked sort of rusty from the air. They also approached it by boat. The North Slope Borough, the local government for the vast and sparsely populated cap of Alaska, sent its own people out the main village of Barrow to have a look. They scooped up jars of the stuff for analysis in a state lab in Anchorage.

"We responded as if it were an oil product," says Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer. "It was described to us as an oil-like substance, thick and lingering below the surface of the water. Those characteristics can indicate heavy, degraded oil, maybe crude oil, or possibly an intermediate fuel oil." Meanwhile, the story spread over the internet like an oil-spill, giving lots of people a queasy feeling. (Check out a story about the coming battle for the resources of the Arctic.)

Test results released Thursday showed the blob wasn't oil, but a plant - a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, a lot of people are still uneasy. It's something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska's northern coast say they could never remember seeing before. (See pictures of the Arctic.)

Algal blooms are a common and often menacing event along many U.S. coastlines. Some strains are toxic and can close beaches and poison seafood, posing a hazard to consumers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains a forecasting system for the Gulf of Mexico to warn of harmful Florida blooms. On Thursday, on the other side of the continent, U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, urged NOAA to direct at least $500,000 to assess a disastrous red tide - a form of algal bloom. "The state of Maine is currently besieged by the most virulent red tide event ever recorded in the region," Snowe wrote. "As a result of this outbreak, virtually the entire coast of our state has been closed to the harvest of clams, mussels, ocean quahogs, and other shellfish."

While Alaskans may find the algal blob unusual if not frightening, scientists say that algal blooms are nothing new in Arctic Ocean waters, though the blob itself might be a little weird. Brenda Konar, a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said algal outbreaks can and do occur even in icy Arctic waters. It just takes the right combination of nutrients, light and water temperature, she said. "Algae blooms," she says. "It's sort of like a swimming pool that hasn't been cleaned in a while." The blob, Konar said, is a microalgae made up of "billions and billions of individuals." "We've observed large blooms in the past off Barrow although none of them at all like this," Barry Sherr, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, said in an e-mail. "The fact that the locals say they've never seen anything like it suggests that it might represent some exotic species which has drifted into the region, perhaps as a result of global change. For the moment that's just a guess."

So far in Alaska, nothing suggests the Chukchi Sea blob is toxic, although the Coast Guard's Hasenauer said toxicity tests were planned. In any case, virtually no commercial seafood production comes from the waters along Alaska's northern coast, but residents do fish, hunt whales and harvest other animals as part of a traditional subsistence lifestyle. In the meantime, the blob for the most part is staying away from the shoreline and slowly drifting farther and farther away.

 

[CrimsonEagle]

It’s a feast of epic proportions. Storms of “sea snot”—a mix of dead plankton and gelatinous sea creatures, and their feces—drift to the ocean floor, where deep-sea organisms gobble up the sudden windfall.

Global warming and ocean acidification, however, may be increasing the frequency of these sea snot storms, which could have unforeseen effects on marine life by altering how nutrients move around the oceans.

Really? No other possibility's eh?

“In the 24 years of this study, the past 2 years have been the biggest amounts of this detritus by far,” said study leader Christine Huffard, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Hey...wasn't there a pretty big event that happened a couple years ago in Japan? But I guess they know what they are talking about. Has to be Global warming.

In March 2012, less than one percent of the seafloor beneath Station M was covered in dead sea salps. By July 1, more than 98 percent of it was covered in the decomposing organisms, according to the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although climate change is a leading contender for explaining the major increases[/b] in 2011 and 2012, Huffard says that these spikes could be part of a longer-term trend that scientists haven’t yet observed.

Could be a part of? Yes, it very will could. And climate change, climate change, climate change.....yeah, yeah. We hear you.