Deep Sea Giants Are Everywhere. Here's How We Can Find Them

[00:00:00]Check this. The deep ocean is full of giants. They are everywhere. But for being some of the biggest animals on Earth, we can't seem to find them. It's ironic. The biggest animals on Earth are hiding in a giant pool of transparent liquid. Look here. This is a colossal squid, the largest invertebrae on the entire planet. And what I'm showing you right now is the only footage we have of a colossal squid in its natural habitat.

[00:00:28]This is it. I know, not very colossal, right? That's because this is just a baby. We literally just got lucky we found this guy. So, where are the real big ones actually living? And more importantly, how do we actually find them? Well, to understand how a 50-ft monster can just hide on Earth, we first have to clear up a really common misconception. You've probably heard of that famous quote that says, "We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean."

[00:00:57]And honestly, that's completely false.

[00:01:00]We absolutely know what the bottom of the ocean looks like. We have satellites in space right now that use radar to measure tiny bumps and dips in the ocean surface, which lets us map the entire ocean floor to at least a general extent. We know exactly where the underwater mountains are. We know where the trenches are, and we know exactly how deep it goes. The floor is basically mapped. But there's a really obvious problem with this. Mapping the ocean floor is like mapping a forest by only looking at the dirt. Sure, you know where the ground is, but you're completely ignoring literally everything else. Satellites can't see into the water. They can't see the animals. They just see the rock at the very bottom.

[00:01:42]So, when scientists say the ocean is unexplored, they aren't talking about the ground. We have absolutely no idea what is swimming in the endless void between the surface and the floor. The ocean isn't just a flat map. It's a massive 3D space. And in a 3D space that massive, a 50-foot animal is basically just a microscopic speck of dust. But we aren't just guessing that these animals exist based on statistics. We actually already have physical proof. If you want to know what lives in the deep ocean, the easiest way is just to look at the things that already go down there. Sperm whales dive thousands of meters into total darkness every single day, specifically to hunt giant squids. And when they come back up to the surface to breathe, their heads are completely covered in scars. When a giant squid fights back, it wraps its tentacles around the whale's face, and the razor line suction cups leave perfectly circular scars carved directly into the whale's skin. But here's where things get weird. Marine biologists have measured these scars for decades. And while most of the scars perfectly match the size of a standard giant squid suction cups, some of them don't. Some sperm whales have been found with circular scars that are so unbelievably massive that it honestly just stops making sense. If you actually scale these scars up to fit a normal squid, it means whatever made them is way bigger than any squid we actually know about, which is a bit of a problem. And if the scars weren't enough, we also have their stomachs. Whales can't digest squid beaks because they're made of solid chittin. So when scientists look inside the stomachs of deceased sperm whales, they find thousands of them. It's basically like finding a giant terrifying jagged hairball. And mixed in with the normal beaks, they frequently find odd-shaped beaks that look like whatever this is supposed to be. And they don't match any known species on Earth. We have the receipts. We know the giants are down there and the whales are fighting them right now. So why don't we just go down there and look for them?

[00:03:45]Well, if you [music] actually think about how we explore the deep ocean, it becomes painfully obvious why we can't find anything. Animals in the deep sea have spent millions of years adapting to the dark. Their eyes catch the tiniest glimmers of light, and their lateral lines can feel water pressure changing from miles away. They're perfectly built to detect movement, and our brilliant human strategy to find them is to drop a clunky metal submarine into the water.

[00:04:12]Submarines have mechanical thrusters that churn the water and vibrate a lot.

[00:04:17]And because humans can't see in the dock, we strap blinding white LED headlights to the front of the sub just so we don't crash into a rock. [music] To a deep sea animal, a submarine is basically just a screaming metal tank falling from the sky. Long before the submarine ever gets close enough to actually see anything, every single animal in a 5m radius has already felt it coming. And because survival in the deep sea is about conserving energy and avoiding danger, they don't stick around to investigate. They aren't looking up going, "Oh, I wonder if that's a science team." They just leave. Our best technology is actively scaring away the exact [music] things we're trying to find. Which is why historically, our best discoveries haven't come from science at all. Because our submarines are so loud and obnoxious, almost every single major giant we have discovered in the last 50 years was found by pure dumb luck. Take the mega mouth shark. This is a 16 ft long shark with a glowing mouth that uses its filter feed in the dark.

[00:05:17]It's one of the largest sharks in the entire ocean. But scientists didn't actually [music] track this thing down.

[00:05:23]In 1976, a US Navy ship was just dragging a random sea anchor off the coast of Hawaii, and the shark accidentally got its teeth tangled in the parachute cables. They literally just pulled it up by accident. The exact same thing happened with the Big Fin Squid. The most famous footage we have of it wasn't even from a research vessel. It was literally taken by a remote camera operated by the Shell Oil Company, who were just checking on their underwater drilling pipes. We're essentially just occasionally bumping into them when they aren't paying attention. And the reason they're so incredibly good at avoiding us comes down to exactly where they live. When most people picture deep sea animals, they picture them crawling around on the ocean floor, [music] hiding behind rocks, or burying themselves in the sand. But realistically, the true giants of the ocean are hanging around in the bathopagic and abyssopelagic zones. This is the midwater void. This environment is essentially just endless pitch black water. There are no walls. There's no ceiling. There's no floor. It's just an expanse of nothingness that stretches for thousands of miles in every direction. If you're a giant animal living in a coral reef, you have to worry about hiding your massive body behind a rock. But in the midwater void, the only way to hide is to just be invisible. And they're incredibly good at [music] it. Many deep sea giants have evolved to be completely dark red or black. Since red light doesn't penetrate the deep ocean, being red makes you physically impossible to see. Others, like glass squids, are just completely transparent. If an [music] animal is completely invisible and it lives in an environment with no boundaries where it can swim up, down, left, or right into an endless [music] void, finding it with a camera is, yeah, good luck with that.

[00:07:07]So, if we can't see them and our submarines just scare them away, how do we actually prove what's down [music] there? Well, we just need some water.

[00:07:17]Well, scientists finally realized that looking for the actual animal was a waste of time. Instead, they started looking for what the animal leaves behind. Every single living thing in the ocean is constantly shedding. They shed skin cells, they shed mucus, they bleed, and they poop. All of this waste just drifts down into the water column and floats around. This is where [music] environmental DNA or Edna comes in.

[00:07:42]Instead of driving a loud submarine around hoping to see a giant squid, scientists can now just lower a sterile bottle into the deep ocean, scoop up a single liter of pitch black water, and bring it back to the lab. Then they run that water through a sequencer that scans all the floating genetic material.

[00:07:59]It's basically like scanning barcodes at a grocery store. The machine reads the DNA and checks it against a global database of every known ocean animal.

[00:08:08]And the results from the deep ocean are honestly kind of staggering. When scientists sequence deep sea water, a massive percentage of the DNA they pull up comes back as unrecognized. It doesn't match any known fish. It doesn't match any known squid. And it doesn't match any known mammal. We literally have the DNA of undiscovered animals in our hands. We know exactly what zone they're swimming in, and we know they were there just a few hours ago. But Edna has also taught us something else.

[00:08:37]It turns out our entire idea of what a monster looks like is completely wrong.

[00:08:42]When we hear the word giant, we immediately expect something built like a tank. We expect a shark with heavy armor or a giant squid with thick tentacles. We expect something solid.

[00:08:52]But the deep ocean doesn't really reward heavy armor. building thick bones and dense muscle require a massive amount of calcium and calories which are incredibly rare in the deep sea. So instead of building solid bodies, some of the largest animals on Earth went the complete opposite route. They became jelly. In 2020, scientists exploring the deep canyons off the coast of Australia stumbled across a glowing string floating in the water that looked like well this. It looked like a piece of rope, but when they measured it, it was over 150 ft long. This was a siphonophore. A siphonophore is actually a colonial organism, which means it's made up of thousands of individual microscopic clones that all link together to function as one massive body. Some clones act as a stomach, some act as a swimming thrusters, and some act as a stinging tentacles. At 150 ft, this specific siphonophore was significantly longer than a blue whale.

[00:09:49]It's arguably the longest animal ever discovered on planet Earth. But you'd never see this in a museum because its body is so fragile that if you tried to bring it up to the surface, the change in pressure and temperature would cause it to literally melt into a puddle of slime, which doesn't exactly make for a great museum exhibit. There are likely thousands of these string-like giants floating in the abyss right now. They're completely silent, completely transparent, and absolutely huge. But if we want to actually film these creatures without scaring them, we have to completely change our tactics. If a loud glowing submarine scares everything away, the only logical solution is to just shut up and sit still. This was the exact realization that marine biologist Edith Widow had. She knew that deep sea animals couldn't see red light, and she knew they were attracted to bioluminescence. So, she built a camera system called the Medusa. The Medusa is brilliant because of what it doesn't have. It has no thrusters. It makes absolutely zero noise and it uses red light cameras, [music] which means to the animals in the deep, the camera is completely invisible. The Medusa just sinks into the pitch black water and hangs there silently. Attached to the front of the camera is a small electronic lore called the E jelly. It's basically just a ring of blue LED lights that flashes in a specific circular pattern, perfectly mimicking the distress signal of a deep sea jellyfish.

[00:11:15]In the deep ocean, a flashing jellyfish means one thing. Something is currently being eaten, which means there's a free meal nearby. It's basically the deep sea equivalent of a flashing neon open sign at a diner. In 2012, they dropped the Medusa off the coast of Japan. It sat in the freezing darkness, completely silent, just flashing its little blue light. And out of the darkness, a 30foot giant squid slowly swam right up to the camera. This was the first time we have ever filmed a giant squid alive. We have been trying to find them with submarines for decades and completely failed. But the moment we turned off the engines and just waited, the monster came to us.

[00:11:56]Which brings up an incredibly interesting question. If a tiny flashing electronic jellyfish was enough to lure out a 30-foot giant squid, what would happen if we scaled this up? What if we took it a step further? What if we built a silent ladder and attached a law that mimic the acoustic and visual signs of a dying sperm whale or a struggling giant squid? In the ocean, predators are always attracted to the struggles of other large animals. It's the ultimate dinner bell. If we dropped a high-tech bait station into the deepest trenches of the Pacific and just left it there for months, what would actually show up?

[00:12:31]Would we see a new species of colossal squid? Would we see a deep sea shark that makes the Greenland shark look tiny? Or would we see something we didn't even know was possible? The Medusa proved that passive hunting works. We just haven't tried it on a massive scale yet. But before you start imagining a 100 foot prehistoric shark swimming out of the dark to eat the camera, we do need to set some realistic boundaries. Whenever people talk about undiscovered giants in the deep sea, the conversation inevitably circles back to the megalodon. People love the idea that a 60 ft super predator just swam down into the Mariana Trench to hide from extinction. But realistically, that's not going to happen. The deep sea has an even worse problem. There's barely any food because there's no sunlight. There are no plants. The entire food web relies on marine snow, which is just dead flakes of skin and poop slowly falling from the surface. To survive down here, you basically have to do nothing. You have to move slowly, lower your metabolism, and just wait for food to come to you. A megalodon was a warm-blooded apex predator. It requires tens of thousands of calories every single day just to keep its body temperature up. and power its massive muscles. If you dropped a megalodon into the abyssopelagic zone, it would just burn through all of its energy in a matter of days and well die. Deep sea gigantism works because cold-blooded animals like squids and jellyfish can slow their metabolisms down to a crawl.

[00:14:00]They can go months without eating. A high energy shark simply cannot physically exist in an environment with no food. But just because they aren't megalodons doesn't mean you're safe.

[00:14:11]It's easy to hear these animals are cold-blooded and slowmoving and think that they aren't actually a threat. But obviously being energyefficient doesn't somehow make you immune to being a complete nightmare. A colossal squid might have a slow metabolism, but it's still a,000lb wall of muscle. And it doesn't just have suction cups. Its tentacles are lined with dozens of swiveling hooks. When it strikes, it sinks those hooks deep into your flesh.

[00:14:36]And as it pulls you in, the hooks physically rotate to rip chunks of meat away. You're not walking away from that.

[00:14:43]And those fragile siphonophores, they might look like harmless jelly, but every single inch of that 150 ft string is packed with millions of microscopic harpoons that look like, yeah, I wouldn't want to touch that. If a fish swims into that invisible net, it's instantly paralyzed, and the colony slowly digests it alive. Nature is just so beautiful, isn't it? But it proves a point. You don't need to be a warm-blooded shark to be deadly. In the deep ocean, the most dangerous animals are the ones you never even see coming.

[00:15:15]And even if we can't see them, we can actually hear them. Water is incredibly dense. And because of that density, sound travels about 4 and 1/2 times faster in water than it does in air. It also travels significantly further. A low frequency sound in the deep ocean can travel for thousands of miles before fading away. To monitor the ocean, scientists use massive networks of underwater microphones called hydrophones. Originally, these were built by the military to listen for enemy submarines. But today, scientists use them to listen to the animals. We can track the exact migration route of blue whales by just listening to their calls. We can hear underwater earthquakes, and we can hear icebergs crackling. But constantly mixed in with the known sounds of the ocean, the hydrophones pick up things that we simply cannot identify. Now, I know everyone remembers the famous bloop recording from the '90s, which people thought was a giant sea monster, but it was actually just an ice quake. But the Bloop isn't the only sound down there.

[00:16:16]There are thousands of hours of audio recordings with strange clicks and hums that don't match any known animal or earthquake. We're literally listening to unidentified animals communicating and moving in the dark right now. We know exactly what direction the sound is coming from. We just don't know what is making it. And unfortunately, we're running out of time to find out. For millions of years, the deep ocean has been completely untouched by humans. It was too deep, too cold, and too pressurized for us to actually ruin it.

[00:16:46]But that's rapidly changing. Right now, global corporations are preparing to start deep sea mining. The ocean floor is covered in polytallic nodules, which are basically just potato-ized rocks packed with rare metals like cobalt or nickel that we desperately need for electric car batteries. To get them, these companies are building remote controlled bulldozers that will drive across the abyssal planes, vacuuming up the top layer of the ocean floor, or really vacuuming up absolutely everything in their path. And this is a massive problem for the giants hiding down there. Remember how we talked about deep sea animals having hyper sensitive lateral lines to feel tiny vibrations?

[00:17:25]Now imagine dropping a 30 ton mining drill into their completely silent environment. The noise alone will be completely deafening, traveling for hundreds of miles and completely destroying their ability to well survive. Worse than that, the machines will kick up toxic plumes of sediment that will float up into the midwater void, choking out the exact zones where these undiscovered animals live. We're about to drop industrial bulldozers into the most unexplored ecosystem on the planet. And the terrifying reality is we might accidentally drive these undiscovered giants to extinction before we even get the chance to officially prove they exist. Which makes the search for them more important now than ever.

[00:18:06]It's really easy to look at our modern world and feel like we figured everything out. We have satellites that can read a license plate from space. We have mapped out the entire human genome.

[00:18:17]We have rovers driving around on Mars.

[00:18:20]It feels like the age of discovery is over. But the deep ocean proves that we're nowhere close to knowing everything. The fact that a 50-ft animal can exist on our planet, swimming around right below us, completely undetected by all of our advanced technology, just goes to show how massive and wild the ocean actually is. We don't own the abyss. We aren't the masters down there.

[00:18:41]We're just visitors trying to shine a tiny flashlight into a completely endless void. And honestly, for all of us here at Beyond the Blue, there's something incredibly comforting about the fact the ocean is still capable of keeping a secret. There are monsters down there. Real giants have survived every single mass extinction on Earth.

[00:19:00]They're swimming in the dark right now, completely aware that we even exist. And hopefully before we ruin their home with mining drills, we can finally figure out a way to turn off our loud engines, sit quietly in the dark, and officially meet them. But anyways, as much as I want to see what's actually hiding down there, you definitely won't catch me getting into a tiny metal submarine anytime soon. I think I'll stick to dry land.

[00:19:25]Thank you guys for watching and I hope you enjoyed this one. Please leave some suggestions in the comments for what ocean mysteries we should cover next because I really do read through them.

[00:19:34]Also, if you haven't seen my second channel yet, Beyond the Green, make sure to check that out, too, if you want to see some stuff outside the water. Also, if you want to see our video about the absolute craziest things we've already found at the very bottom of the ocean, check out this video