The Deepstaria | Black Hole of the Deep Sea

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:05]Deep in the oceans twilight and midnight zones, drifts something that barely even looks alive. No tentacles, no obvious shape or structure, just a thin, ghost-like sheet floating throughout total darkness. This is the deepstaria.

[00:00:19]Coming in at 60 to 75 cm or about 2 to 2.5 ft across, the deepstaria was given its name [music] after its discovery in the 1960s by a deep-sea submersible called [music] Deep Star 4000. As of now, we've only seen the deepstaria only a handful of times. The deepstaria isn't built like normal jellyfish. Its [music] bell is paper thin. It's extremely fragile. Its body lacks any shape or structure, and it's so translucent, it looks almost unfinished, easily going unseen by unfortunate prey, predators, and humans attempting to study them.

[00:00:51]Instead of long stinging tentacles for hunting, [music] defense, like most jellyfish, its entire body serves as a feeding surface, [music] hunting like a passive feeding trap, a lot like a living bag or net. The deepstaria silently and effortlessly drifts throughout the darkness of the oceans midnight and twilight [music] zones. And when prey drifts too close, small crustaceans, larva, anything unlucky enough to cross its path, the deepstaria doesn't chase, it envelops. The deepstaria's bell slowly closes in on itself like a living bag, trapping the entirety of its prey inside its bell, digesting it across a web of internal canals spread throughout the deepstaria's [music] body. There's no strike, no sting, and no real chase, just patience. This method of hunting uses minimal muscle and energy and maximizes the chances [music] of an animal unknowingly drifting inside the deepstaria's bell. But some encounters show something even stranger, small deep-sea isopods living inside the deepstaria's bell, riding in it, sheltering in it, possibly even surviving by stealing some of the deepstaria's food. No one knows if this is true symbiosis or a slow parasitic [music] death. Although not proven, if this is true symbiosis, I speculate that by eating some of the deepstaria's food [music] or leftover organic matter located inside the deepstaria's bell, this could actually help clean the deepstaria from a buildup of bacteria, preventing illness and death. The deepstaria doesn't move like normal jellyfish either. It doesn't pulse like other jellyfish. Instead, it uses slow wave-like contractions called peristaltic motion, barely spending any energy to move. And [music] when a deepstaria dies, its massive jelly flatness body sinks in what's known as a jelly fall, a sudden rain of carbon and nutrients feeding life on the seafloor below. We still don't know how deepstaria [music] reproduces, how long it lives, or even how many exist. But what we do know is that there are only two known species of deepstaria thus far, deepstaria enigmatica and deepstaria [music] reticulum, and that deepstaria survived by becoming almost nothing at all. The deepstaria [music] is a body without force, a hunter without pursuit, a void that envelops all it can, always consuming before ever being [music] noticed.