genomic sequencing of their DNA revealed something mindblowing.
As soon as you enter the ocean and go
down past 200 m, sunlight fades. Past
1,000 m, it's gone entirely.
Welcome to the Midnight Zone, the home
of a creature that looks like it's
crawled in from a galaxy far, far away.
Its species name is Vader, because when
the scientists who first described it in
January 2025 saw its helmet-shaped
heads, they thought of one person, Darth
Vader.
This Sith Lord is actually a super giant
isopod. Or if you prefer the nightmare
version, a woodlouse the size of a
soccer ball. Pick one up and people have
when they've caught them in nets and
you're holding 33 cm and nearly a
kilogram of armorplated deep sea tank.
Flip it over and there are 14 legs. Two
compound eyes built from roughly 4,000
lenses each packed like honeycomb and a
mouth made of four jagged plates that
close inward.
Giant isopods can live as deep as the
bartheal zone. The deep continental
slope somewhere around 2,000 m down,
pitch black, near freezing, crushing
pressure, and almost nothing to eat. So,
how do they survive?
When a dead whale carcass or dead tuna
does drift down, these isopods gorge
themselves so heavily that they can't
move afterwards. Scientists politely
call it postfeeding immobility, although
you and I might just call it a food
coma. This can keep Barthemus Vader full
for an incredibly long time. In fact,
one individual in a Japanese aquarium
went 5 years and 43 days without eating.
Not because it was sick, it just wasn't
hungry. But here's the paradox. In a
world with almost no food, you'd expect
tiny, hyperefficient scavengers, right?
As a basic principle of evolutionary
biology, when food is scarce, being
small is an advantage. Smaller bodies
need less energy to survive. But in the
deep ocean, you get an armored giant
that treats half a decade without a meal
as a minor inconvenience.
Down here, being big isn't excess. It's
strategy.
The deep ocean is cold. Below 1,000 m,
temperatures hover between 2 and 4° C,
just above freezing. Now, Barthenmus
Vader is coldblooded, and you would
therefore be forgiven for assuming that
it doesn't generate its own heat, but it
does. Even coldblooded animals lose
energy to their environment. Chemical
reactions in cells produce heat as a
byproduct. And in cold water, a larger
body retains that energy more
efficiently. They might not have warm
blood, but they don't want to freeze.
This idea that a larger body stores more
energy and burns it more slowly is
called Bergman's rule. And it dates back
to 1847 when German biologist Carl
Bergman noticed something simple.
Animals in colder places are bigger.
It's about the ratio of surface area to
volume. Let's break this down for a
second. So, a cube with size of 1 cm has
6 cm squared of surface area. And 1 cm
cubed of volume. Make it 2 cm on each
side. The volume goes up eight times.
But the surface area only goes up four
times. The bigger you get, the more
inside you have relative to your
outside. Barthonomous's giant body holds
more energy than a small one. But
crucially, it burns through that energy
far more slowly. Less surface area
relative to its mass means less heat
escapes, which means its metabolism can
drop to almost nothing and stay there.
It's not waiting for food. It's barely
noticing food is gone. This explains why
this creature has grown so large on such
little food. But a big question still
remains about how they evolved to be
like this. And it turns out the answer
lies even deeper into the ocean with an
even bigger monster. So extreme that
when scientists sequence its DNA, they
had to check the results twice.
You'll know already about the Mariana
Trench. In fact, we made a video on it.
In this place, 7 kilometers under the
ocean's surface, so dark and crushing
we've barely visited it, scientists
found a super giant. Alichella Gigante
is the world's largest amphipod at 34 cm
long. Now, that might not sound enormous
until you realize it shallow water
equivalent is the size of a grain of
rice. This deep sea beast is actually 50
times the size of its cousins. It's the
equivalent of a can of beer scaled up to
the size of a T-Rex. Allied cello is
built to live in what's called the
aphotic zone below a thousand m where
less than 1% of sunlight makes it
through.
Most deep sea anthropods here are red or
orange and there's a really good reason
for that. Camouflage. Red light has a
longer wavelength compared to other
colors and is usually absorbed within
the first 100 m or so of the ocean. So
essentially, no red light makes it to
the aphotic zone. Here, red animals
appear completely black. The perfect
disguise. But Alicella isn't red. It's
almost a translucent white. Why? Well,
down here, it has virtually no
predators. It's too big and its armored
exterior too tough to make it a
worthwhile meal for other inhabitants of
the deep. The fact that it's not
camouflage also suggests that visual
hunting isn't a big thing at this depth.
In other words, it doesn't need to hide.
Now, as interesting as all of that was,
it doesn't tell us how this thing became
a giant. This was something scientists
only discovered in 2019 when they
sequenced its genome. Every living thing
runs on a genome. It's like a master
instruction manual. Humans, mice, dogs.
Virtually all creatures have roughly the
same number of genes, somewhere around
20,000.
When researchers measure the nuclear
genome sizes of 13 deep sea amphipods,
Alichellas dwarfed everything else in
the study by a factor of nearly nine. At
34 gigabases, it is one of the largest
crustation genomes ever recorded. And
crucially in this case, the animals with
the biggest genomes had the biggest
bodies. Size is written into the
blueprint before the animal even begins
to grow. Then in 2021, researcher Wenhi
and his team at Shanghai Ocean
University went deeper. They compared
the transcripttos of Aliella against a
much smaller Hel relative and found
something striking. If you needed a
quick refresh on transcripttos, by the
way, here's how I think of them. So, the
genome in my head is sort of a library
of every book ever written. And the
transcripttos are the sort of list of
books currently open on the reading
desk. Essentially, the transcriptto
tells us which instructions the body is
actually using at that exact moment.
Now, Alichella carries genes that
regulate how cells multiply and how
bodies accumulate mass that show clear
signs of positive selection. Genes that
are not just present, but actively being
pushed by evolution. The signal, it
seems, never fully stops. Most animals
reach adult size and the instruction to
grow goes quiet. In Alicella, something
keeps the dial turned up year after
year, decade after decade, with no hard
ceiling. Scientists call this
indeterminate growth. And Aliella's
genome appears built for exactly that.
This is the molecular machinery that
allows gigantism to happen. At the
surface, a giant genome would be a
liability. It's slow and inefficient to
copy and uses up lots of energy. You'd
lose to faster, leaner competitors. But
7,000 m down, where life moves slowly
and predators are scarce, that massive
genome is now an advantage.
So food scarcity and subzero
temperatures make it pay for creatures
to be big. And a huge genome that never
gets the signal to stop growing is how
deep sea giants grow. So huge. So that's
it, I guess. End of video. Thanks for
watching and we'll see you in the next
one. If only things were that simple.
Because our next giant takes things even
further. And to find it, we have to go
somewhere that shouldn't support life at
all. To meet an animal so strange, it
forced scientists to rethink what an
animal even is.
Most starfish have five arms. But as you
descend 500 m down, something strange
happens. They suddenly get 50.
This is the Antarctic sun starfish, 60
cm across, living in water so cold that
it sits a fraction of a degree above
freezing. It uses those arms like
fishing rods, writhing through the
water, snatching anything that drifts
past, which is why it's often referred
to as the wolf trap starfish. But before
we get into why this starfish is so
supersized, a quick word on how deeply
strange starfish already are. They have
no brain and no bloods. And to eat, they
eject their stomachs out of their mouths
to engulf the food, digest it, and then
slide it back inside.
It's both awesome and disgusting in
equal measure. But anyway, in 2023,
Stanford researchers were mapping the
master genes that tell every animal cell
what part of the body it belongs to,
whether that's a tail, a lung, a fin, or
something else. But when they got round
to the starfish, their results were
astonishing. Because the starfish is
just a head. A head that at some point
evolved the ability to walk around on
the sea floor, eating things by ejecting
its own stomach. And if you thought that
was cool, by the way, it's not until you
zoom into the cellular level that the
magic really begins. You see, there are
two ways to build a bigger animal. One
is to pack in more cells, which is what
elephants do. An elephant cell is
roughly the same size as a mouse cell.
There are just trillions more of them.
Or another option would be to make each
individual cell bigger. Inside every
living cell, two processes are
constantly racing. The cell building
itself up, making proteins, accumulating
mass, and the cell copying its DNA, then
dividing it into two, which keeps it
nice and small. In warm water, these two
processes run at roughly the same speed.
Copy, divide, copy, divide. But here's
the thing. In near freezing water, the
chemistry of cell growth changes.
Protein synthesis, the building part
keeps going, but the signal to divide
slows down. The cell keeps accumulating
mass, but the trigger to split is
delayed. By the time division finally
happens, the cell is already far larger
than it would be in warm water. And if
every brick in the wall is oversized,
the wall is oversized, too. The
Antarctic sun starfish lives in water
that sits a fraction of a degree above
freezing all year round. Exactly the
conditions where this mechanism runs at
full power, 50 arms, 60 cm across. The
cold didn't just allow this animal to
grow. It built it from the inside out.
Now, don't get me wrong, these animals
are pretty cool. quite literally in the
case of the starfish. But we promised
you deep sea giants, the really big
stuff, and I am ready to deliver. From
here on out, these things are going to
get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Let's start with a creature with legs
nearly 4 m long. With the same basic
body plan as every insect that ever
lived, made absolutely massive by an
invisible ingredient, almost everything
on Earth needs to survive. Every
arropod, that's every insect, spider,
and crab, shares the same design flaw.
No veins. Their blood doesn't travel
through a closed system, but instead
sloshes around loose inside the body
cavity, bathing the organs directly.
Scientists, perhaps rather kindly, call
it an open circulatory system. But
really, it's a terrible way to deliver
oxygen at scale. On land, this puts a
hard limit on size. The largest insect
alive today, New Zealand's giant wetter
cricket, weighs barely more than a golf
ball. But 300 million years ago,
atmospheric oxygen was nearly double
what it is today, allowing creatures to
grow much larger. Dragon flies had
wingspans of 70 cm with the same body
plan as a regular dragonfly, just
supercharged by oxygen. Back to today,
off the coast of Japan, cold water
sweeps down from the north in powerful
deep currents. At 10° C, this seawater
dissolves roughly 40% more oxygen than
warm surface water. And that oxygenrich
current has been flowing over the same
stretch of seafloor for millions of
years, long enough for evolution to take
advantage. A few hundred meters down, we
find the Japanese spider crab. Locally
known as Taka Ashi, meaning tallle legs
crab. With legs stretching to almost 4 m
tip to tip, wider than a VW beetle,
weighing up to 19 kg, this is the
largest living arropod on Earth. That
same open circulatory system that stops
insects growing large on land is now a
crucial advantage. Cold water doesn't
just carry more dissolved oxygen. It
dramatically slows the metabolic rate of
every cell in the animal's body,
reducing how much oxygen it actually
needs. The demand drops and larger
bodies in cold water are better at
regulating oxygen uptake than smaller
ones. As a crab grows, its body volume
increases faster than the surface area
of its gills. In warm water, that
creates a problem. There's not enough
gill surface to supply enough oxygen to
all of that tissue. But cold water
changes the equation in two ways.
Firstly, it slows down the metabolism of
every cell, meaning the body needs less
oxygen to keep running. Secondly, it
holds more dissolved oxygen per liter,
so the demand drops and the supply rises
simultaneously. A body size that would
slowly suffocate in the tropics breathes
comfortably in cold water.
Like most long live decapod crustations,
there is no final instruction to stop
growing. The legs keep lengthening year
after year for as long as the animal
survives. With a lifespan that can reach
a 100red years, that's a lot of leg. So,
if their legs never stop growing, why
don't we find crabs with 10, 20, 100
meter long legs? Well, there's still a
hard limit on the total energy
available. And although they keep
growing, it happens very slowly. In most
cases, they die before the growth stops.
Every year, the Japanese spider crab
molts its shell and grows a new one,
spending days as a completely
defenseless, softbodied 4 m target. And
often that spells the end of the road
for this crap. But some other giants do
far better.
private as we head back to the giants of the deep.
Dropping down to 1,000 m deep into the
twilight zone of the Pacific Ocean lives
a giant that has remained essentially
unchanged for millions of years. Yet, we
only identified one out in the wild for
the first time in 2026.
The goblin shark. It has a flabby body,
a soft and barely calcified skeleton,
weak muscles, and poor eyesight. in any
Reef documentary. This thing would be
lunch before the opening credits are
even finished. And yet, here it is, 6 m
long, 200 kg, with a lineage stretching
back 125 million years into the
Cretaceous period. This species has
survived mass extinctions, ice ages, and
the collapse of entire ecosystems.
So, either the deep sea is
extraordinarily forgiving, or this shark
plays a completely different game. It
doesn't chase. It doesn't cruise.
Instead, it hangs suspended in the
darkness, virtually motionless, waiting
for a signal. Every living animal
produces a faint electrical field when
its muscles fire. A heartbeat, a twitch,
anything. And the goblin shark reads
those signals through a snout packed
with hundreds of electro receptors. It
doesn't need eyes down here. It sees in
electricity. When a signal is detected,
it deploys its one extraordinary trick.
Two pairs of elastic ligaments hold the
jaw assembly locked under the skull,
preloaded like a crossbow. And when
triggered, the entire jaw fires forwards
at more than 3 m per second. This strike
was first filmed in 2016 by Professor
Nikica, and it was over in less than a
quarter of a second. Quite literally,
blink and you'd miss it. And that
matters at 1,000 meters. Food is so
scarce that every calorie has to be
accounted for. Every predator runs a
sort of energy budget. You spend
calories hunting and you need to recover
more than you spent from whatever you
catch. In shallow water, where prey is
abundant, an active hunting strategy
pays off. But down here, the sums don't
work that way. A sustained chase at this
depth would burn far more energy than
the meal at the end could ever replace.
The goblin shark solved this problem by
eliminating the hunts almost entirely.
It burns almost nothing waiting. It
burns almost nothing striking. The jaw
does the work in a third of a second and
then the shark goes back to doing
nothing. An approach that's proved more
reliable than speed, strength, or
stamina ever could. But how does it get
away with being well so bad at
everything else? On a coral reef, being
big and slow is a death sentence.
Predators keep animals fast, sharp, and
small. And that evolutionary pressure
shapes everything about how life looks
in shallow water. At 1,000 m, that
pressure almost disappears. It's cold,
it's dark, and food is genuinely scarce.
But danger is rarer still. That's the
goblin shark's secret. It didn't survive
by being the best predator in the ocean.
It survived by finding the one place on
Earth where being slow, soft, and half
blind is absolutely fine, provided you
can do one thing faster than anything
else alive.
But yet again, there is so much more to
this tale of deep sea giants. Go deeper,
3,000 m deeper, and the monsters get
even bigger, even weirder. We are
talking about a giant trailing arms 10 m
long through the darkness.
Meet Stigio Medusa Gigantia, the giant
phantom jelly that lurks in the midnight
zone. It's named after the river sticks
in Greek mythology. The cold dark river
that connected the living world to
Hades, the realm of the dead. Its bell,
the umbrella-shaped body we might call a
head, is about a meter across. From it
trail four vast ribbon-like arms, each
roughly the length of a double-decker
bus. These are not tentacles, not fine
stinging threads. They are thick,
muscular curtains of flesh drifting
through total darkness, covered in mucus
that traps anything that drifts into
them. When prey makes contact, those
ribbons curl inward and the bell itself
stretches to nearly five times its
resting size to engulf it.
This footage comes from an expedition to
the Gulf of California, where the
Mterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
and Bari's ROV saw its predatory tactics
firsthand.
This animal competes with squids, deep
sea fish, and with whales for food. And
it does so without a brain, without a
central nervous system, and without
anything we would recognize as a control
system at all. But leave one on a beach,
and it would almost evaporate. Try to
haul one up in a troll net, and it turns
to goo, which is actually a clue into
its giant existence. Here's where this
stops being spectacle and starts being
physics. At sea level, roughly 1 kg of
pressure pushes down on every square
cime of your skin. Go underwater and you
add another kilogram for every 10 m of
depth. At 1,000 m, that's 100 kg per
square cm, bearing down on everything.
At the deepest confirmed sightings of
this animal, somewhere beyond 6,000 m,
the pressure is equivalent to 620 kg.
focus on an area the size of your
thumbnail. At similar depths,
submersibles have imploded faster than
the human brain can even process sound.
So, how does a 10 m brainless curtain of
jelly survive where engineering doesn't?
Well, by having nothing to crush.
Pressure destroys air pockets, rigid
skeletons, and sealed chambers. It finds
the gaps and it squeezes. But Sigio
Medusa has none of those. Its body is
roughly 95% water and water is virtually
incompressible.
The pressure inside its tissues
equalizes instantly with the pressure
outside. There is no air pocket to
collapse, no rigid structure to buckle,
no sealed chamber to implode. There is
nothing to crush. Other deep sea
creatures have the same problem. They
can't rely on gas filled spaces for
buoyancy, structure, or breathing.
Instead, everything that lives here is
either mostly water or other chemical
alternatives.
Cold water pushes growth. Low predation
allows it. Extreme pressure eliminates
anything rigid enough to snap. And
what's left, what survives all three
forces simultaneously is something the
shallow worlds simply cannot produce.
Now, so far up to this point, each giant
we've encountered has been shaped by one
force or two. But what comes next is
shaped by all of them at once and turned
up to full power. A creature that also
looms large in mythology.
In Japanese folklore, the orfish has a
name, Ryu Nokai,
the messenger from the sea god's palace.
In the west, we call it something less
poetic, the doomsday fish. The legend
tells that when these animals surface,
it's a sign of danger from the deep, a
foroding alarm signal for an earthquake,
a tsunami, something catastrophic from
below. And this isn't a fringe belief.
It's a centuries old superstition in a
country that sits on the Pacific Ring of
Fire and has learned the hard way to
look out for patterns in nature. And the
data, if you squint, is uncomfortable.
In 2009 and 2010, around 20 orfish
washed ashore on Japanese beaches. In
March 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and
tsunami killed nearly 18,000 people. A
2019 scientific study examined the
correlation and concluded it was almost
certainly coincidental. The sample sizes
were just too small. The time frames
were too loose. But it's not been
completely ruled out. The orfish lives
at depths of 200 to a,000 m, right at
the level where seismic activity
disturbs the water column most severely.
Some researchers have suggested that
pre-earquake geological stress releases
gases and changes pressure gradients at
depth, potentially disorientating deep
sea animals and driving them upwards.
They are blade thin and silver from head
to tail with a crimson fin running their
entire length. This creature has no
scales, no teeth, and is the longest
bony fish alive. The largest specimen
ever properly measured came in at 8 m,
but we don't actually know how big it
can get. There are credible reports of
11, even some accounts of 17 m. So, why
can't we be more precise? Well, almost
every orish we've ever found was already
dead or dying when we reached it.
They're so fragile on the surface that
their bodies deteriorate within hours of
surfacing. And their skin is so soft it
falls apart on contact. And crucially,
as we'll see in a moment, most specimens
arrive already missing their tails. So,
up to this point, we've only been
measuring stumps. Some scientists
actually managed to film a living orfish
in its natural habitat in 2010 just off
the Gulf of Mexico by a remotely
operated vehicle that happened to just
be in the right place at the right time.
Scientists estimated the individual was
around 10 m, but it could grow
considerably longer and we would have no
way of knowing. All fish hang vertically
in the water column, tail pointing
straight down, perfectly still, like a
silver exclamation point in total
darkness. They filter feed on krill. In
fact, one specimen found off the coast
of California had 10,000 krills in its
stomach. That's two small cereal bowls
full of tiny shrimp for a creature twice
as tall as a giraffe. 3/4 of your fish
is tail. Everything vital to life,
heart, organs, reproductive system is
crammed into the front quarter and the
rest is in a very real biological sense
expendable. All fish regularly and
deliberately amputate their own tails.
Sometimes just the tip goes, sometimes
more than half. Scientists call it auto
tummy or self-cutting, and they don't
fully understand why this happens. With
no confirmed predators, it's unlikely
the orfish is borrowing the same trick
lizards use to escape a predator's grip,
for example. But unlike lizards, the
tail doesn't regenerate. Whatever is
lost is gone permanently.
And yet, the orfish keeps gaining mass
regardless. As a teost fish, it carries
the same open-ended growth biology
shared by most of its relatives. No
programmed ceiling, no instruction to
stop. Nobody has ever found the upper
limit. The Orfish is a textbook case of
everything we've learned so far about
deep sea gigantism. Cold water slows
cell division. Pressure eliminates
anything rigid. Scarcity demands maximum
energy efficiency. And the near total
absence of predators removes the one
force that keeps everything else small.
Every condition that makes the deep sea
hostile to life has in this animal been
flipped into a growth advantage. It gave
up warmth, food, and light for something
the surface could never offer. The
freedom to just keep going.
And there is one last mega giant that
evaded science for more than a century.
An animal so elusive that everything we
know about it came from fragments pulled
from the stomachs of whales. It was only
in 2025 that a team of scientists
finally saw one alive for the first
time. And what that footage showed
stopped them in their tracks. March 9th,
2025, a remotely operated vehicle called
Sebastian is 600 m down in the South
Atlantic near the South Sandwich
Islands. The cameras pick up something
nobody on board had dared to hope for. A
living colossal squid. We first
encountered this animal, the heaviest
invertebrate on the planet, in 1925.
Well, a piece of it anyway. A pair of
arms were found inside a commercially
hunted sperm whale. Over the following
century, only eight adult specimens were
identified, almost all within other
animals caught accidentally in fishing
nets. Yet, despite that, we still know a
remarkable amount. The colossal squid
has the largest eyes of any living
creature, up to 27 cm across and roughly
the size of a soccer ball. evolved to
detect the faintest traces of light in
the permanent darkness of the deep. Its
blood runs blue because where our blood
uses iron to carry oxygen, the colossal
squid uses copper, a molecule called
hemocyanin that works more effectively
in cold, low oxygen water. But perhaps
the most surprising feature is its
brain. It's shaped like a donut, a ring
of neural tissue with a 10 mm hole
punched through the center. But that
hole is not a design flaw. The
esophagus, the food pipe, passes
directly through the middle of the brain
on its way to the stomach. Which means
every mouthful of food the squid
swallows has to fit through that 10 mm
gap. When a fully grown 500 kg colossal
squid gets its prey wrong and swallows
something too large, the food physically
compresses the brain on its way through.
Too big a mouthful isn't just
indigestion, it's neurological damage.
Dr. Cat Bolshad of Oakland University of
Technology had spent over two decades
studying the colossal squid, but had
never seen it in its natural habitat
until March 9th, 2025,
when her team's remotely operated
vehicle, Sebastian, caught the first
living sighting of the squid in the deep
ocean. And one thing in particular stood
out. Cromataphors.
Now, certain sephopods, like this short
fin squid, for example, have large rusty
red brown structures scattered across
their mantle. These are chromataphors or
color changing cells. These animal,
which for a long time we thought were
simply transparent, can switch at will
from being a perfect ghost in the water
column to being completely opaque. In
the total darkness of the deep ocean,
where bioluminescent flashes are the
only light source, the ability to appear
and disappear on command may be how
these animals hunt and survive. So far,
the colossal squid fits in quite well
amongst its fellow deep sea giants. But
there's one factor that throws a major
spanner in the works, and it's its
lifespan.
Many deep sea giants live for a long
time, tens or even hundreds of years.
But the colossal squid is different.
Scientists calculate the age of a squid
by reading growth rings inside its
stataliths, tiny balance organs inside
the squid's head, roughly the size of a
grain of sand, that lay down one
microscopic layer every single day, a
bit like tree rings. Based on this
method and the phenomenal growth rate it
implies, scientists believe the colossal
squid lives for only around 1 to 2
years. Yes, that means it grows from 30
cm to more than half a ton in roughly
the same time it takes a human child to
learn how to walk. So, what's driving
this explosive growth? Well, to find
out, scientists had to go sideways
because the colossal squid's own genome
has never been sequenced. What we do
know comes from its relatives, the
sephopods. Think of DNA as a master
recipe book locked in a vault, never
changed. Now before any recipe gets
used, the cell makes a working copy.
That copy is called messenger RNA. And
in almost every animal on Earth, that
copy is exact. What the DNA says, the
RNA delivers. Sephopods, though, do
something different. They edit the copy.
Not randomly, not accidentally, but in
response to whatever conditions they're
currently facing. Whether that's
freezing temperatures, crushing
pressure, or total darkness. No matter
what it is, the RNA gets adjusted and
the protein it builds changes with it.
In humans, less than 1% of the brain's
genetic instructions are rewritten
before the cell acts on them. In
sephopods, over 60% are. Whether the
colossal squid uses this same trick to
drive its explosive growth rate is one
of the big questions scientists still
don't have the answer to. But one day,
I'm sure they will, and I, for one,
can't wait to find out.
So, why does this all matter? Well,
firstly, it's cool to look at weird and
wonderful creatures. Yeah. But secondly,
because every single one of us is in a
race against time. Our cells divide. Our
telomeres, the tiny protective caps on
our DNA, like the sort of plastic tips
on your shoelaces, are slowly wearing
down. Damage builds as we age, and
eventually systems fail, whether through
cancer or other diseases. And for all
the brilliance of modern medicine, we
are still largely fighting these battles
with tools developed from organisms that
live as we do at the surface. But down
in the deep, evolution has been running
different experiments for hundreds of
millions of years, and we're only just
starting to read the results. Take the
squid's RNA editing. Cancer is at its
core a disease of uncontrolled cell
division. Cells receiving corrupted
instructions and then acting on them.
So, an animal that can edit those
instructions in real time, switching
protein structures on and off in
response to its environment points to a
completely new way of thinking about
cellular control. Scientists right now
are actively investigating whether
similar RNA editing mechanisms could be
harnessed to correct the corrupted
molecular signs that drive tumor growth.
Or think about what the deep sea has
already delivered. In 1990, researchers
at the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography scooped sediment from the
ocean floor of the Bahamas and found a
previously unknown deep sea bacterium
called Selenospora. From it, they
isolated a compound now called Marisanib
that can do something no existing brain
cancer drug can. It crosses the blood
brain barrier. It's currently in the
final stages of clinical trials for
glyobblasto, one of the most untreatable
cancers known to medicine. And it's not
alone. 12 marine derived compounds, have
already received FDA approval as cancer
treatments, with 34 more in clinical
trials. Giant isoples, the animals that
can survive 5 years without food by
dropping their metabolism to almost
nothing, have the potential to inform
research into metabolic disorders, organ
preservation, and potentially the
psychological challenges of long
duration space travel where the human
body must be sustained with minimal
resources for extended periods. We came
looking for monsters in the dark. But
what we found were biological
breakthroughs. Animals that push back
against aging, resist disease, and grow
to impossible sizes using molecular
tricks. We are only just beginning to
understand. The deep ocean isn't just
the last frontier for exploration. It
may well be the last frontier for
biology, too. And I personally can't
wait to keep exploring. Let me know in
the comments down below, which of these
creatures do you love the most? Did we
miss any from this list? And perhaps
most importantly, which ones you think
might still be out there waiting to be
found?