Discovered in the deep: the sea cucumber that lives a jellyfish life

W afting through the deep sea is a diaphanous creature that resembles a jellyfish, but is in fact something else entirely. Pelagothuria natatrix , meaning swimming sea cucumber, belongs to a group of animals better known for lying around on the seabed like giant, rubbery worms. 00:44 Pelagothuria: species of sea cucumber spotted in deep sea dive – video This sea cucumber was first named in the late 19th century, but for a long time it was only known from a few battered specimens brought up in scientific trawl nets.

“They’re extremely fragile, almost to the point of being sort of intangible,” says Chris Mah, a biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. “The fact that they’re gelatinous makes them extremely difficult to study. ” Q&A What is the Discovered in the deep series? Show The ocean is one of the world’s last truly wild spaces.

It teems with fascinating species that sometimes seems to border on the absurd, from fish that look up through transparent heads to golden snails with iron armour. We know more about deep space than deep oceans, and science is only beginning to scratch the surface of the rich variety of life in the depths. As mining companies push to industrialise the sea floor and global leaders continue to squabble over how to protect the high seas , a new Guardian Seascape series will profile some of the most recently discovered weird, wonderful, majestic, ridiculous, hardcore and mind-blowing creatures.

They reveal how much there is still to learn about the least known environment on Earth – and how much there is to protect. Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback. In 2014, Mah sparked what he describes as a rediscovery of the species when he was looking through a database of deep-sea images and spotted an umbrella-like Pelagothuria that was mislabelled as a jellyfish.

Until then, he says, only a handful of scientists were familiar with the species. Mah’s sighting encouraged others to look out for them during deep-sea surveys. Three years later, a team of scientists working in the Pacific Ocean got a spectacular view of these gossamer creatures in their natural environment.

Working on the research ship Okeanos Explorer, the team watched video footage of Pelagothuria beamed up in real time from a deep-diving robot. During the course of nine dives, between American Samoa and Hawaii, they spotted close to 100 of these swimming sea cucumbers, at depths ranging from 196 to 4,440 metres and often in areas with very low oxygen in the seawater. Mah suggests this could be Pelagothuria ’s tactic to avoid predators that are more oxygen-hungry and could easily suffocate.

Pelagothuria natatrix was first named in 1893. Photograph: NOAA/OER How Pelagothuria survives in these challenging conditions is still a mystery, but it likely has something to do with its jelly body. Many animals living in the deep sea have bodies made mostly of water with a small amount of collagen mixed in.

This gelatinous goo requires little energy to make and maintain, and so is ideal for animals living at depths where food is often scarce. Jelly-based animals are also inherently buoyant, so they needn’t waste precious energy and oxygen swimming vigorously to stay afloat; they can just drift around. Out of roughly 1,200 species of sea cucumbers, Pelagothuria is the only one known to spend most of its time swimming.

It uses the web encircling its mouth to propel itself through the water column. Several other sea cucumber species are occasional swimmers. “They live on the bottom, but they can swim when they want to,” says Mah.

The approach of a predatory starfish can stir a sedentary sea cucumber into action. Even a few brief seconds of awkward swimming can be enough to escape. Discovered in the deep: the crustacean with eyes for a head Read more This could be how Pelagothuria’s ancestors started out, then evolving to be better and better swimmers until they adopted a full-time jellyfish lifestyle.

It’s a case of convergent evolution in which distantly related organisms – in this case sea cucumbers and jellyfish – have solved challenges with a similar outcome. “The gelatinous mode of life is definitely something that you see a lot of in midwater animals,” says Mah. “It is such a common adaptation that every organism will have its own story as to how it arrived there.

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