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What Lives in the Middle of the Ocean? · How To Protect The Ocean

• 0:00
  Picture this.
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  You're in a control room on a ship far off the coast of Brazil.
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  It's pretty dark outside.
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  It's even darker below you.
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  A robot the size of a small car is sinking through the black water,
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  a thousand meters down, its lights carving a tunnel through the dark.
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  And then something drifts into frame, big, pale, arms unfurling like a parachute.
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  It's an octopus, a giant open ocean octopus that almost no one has ever seen
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  alive, and she's eating a jellyfish.
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  The scientists in that room go quiet because this is an animal
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  they mostly know from the dead specimens hauled up in the nets.
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  And here she is, alive, feeding, and real.
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  That moment actually happened recently.
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  It's a part of a much bigger story about the biggest living space on the
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  planet, a place where we have barely looked at and a decision the world
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  is about to make about its future.
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  Let's get into it.
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  Welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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  I'm your host, Andrew Lewin.
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  This is a show where we turn ocean science into action that you can actually take.
• 1:04
  If this is your kind of thing, do me a quick favor and hit that follow button
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  right now, wherever you're listening.
• 1:09
  It's free, it tells the algorithm this stuff matters, and it means
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  you won't miss the next episode.
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  So here's the question I wanna answer today.
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  What lives in the middle of the ocean?
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  Why does it matter to you, even if you never go into the deep sea?
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  And what can one person actually do to protect a place
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  three kilometers underwater?
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  Now stick with me, because at the end of this episode, you're going to see
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  the ocean's biggest neighborhood in a completely different way, and I've got
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  a few simple, honest things that you can do this week to help protect it.
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  One story today, but we're gonna tell it in three parts.
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  So part one is the dive.
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  The ship is called Falkor Too.
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  It's run by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a group that does deep sea
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  research and importantly, streams a lot of it online for free.
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  On this expedition, off the coast of Brazil, they sent down a remotely
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  operated vehicle, the deep sea robot named SuBastian, S-U-Bastian, tethered
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  to the ship by a long cable that feeds it power and sends video back in real time.
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  They weren't diving to the sea floor.
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  They were exploring the midwater.
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  That's the open water between the sunlit surface and the bottom.
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  Think of it as the ocean's middle, not the shallows, not
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  the seabed, the vast in between.
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  And what they found there was a parade of animals, many of
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  them brand new to science.
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  More than two dozen species that had never been formally described.
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  New jellyfish, comb jellies, which shimmer and ripple as they beat rows of
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  their tiny hairs like a living rainbow.
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  Siphonophores, strange colonial creatures that string out through
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  the water like a chain of beads.
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  Tadpole-like animals called larvaceans.
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  A gossamer worm that glows, and a tiny crustacean called an amphipod.
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  They spotted a young glass squid, completely see-through, hanging in
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  the water about 780 meters down.
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  They filmed a dinner plate jellyfish hunting a comb jelly, swimming with its
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  tentacles held out in front like a net.
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  And then there was the octopus.
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  Her name scientifically is Haliphron atlanticus.
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  She's an open ocean species, which is unusual for an octopus.
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  Most octopuses live on the bottom.
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  This one lives on the outer water column, and she's big.
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  The body they filmed, just the main part, was about the length of your forearm.
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  But this species can grow to around four meters from arm tip
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  to arm tip, and weigh as much as a grown adult, roughly 75 kilograms.
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  Here's why the team got so excited.
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  Almost everything we know about this animal comes from specimens
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  caught in nets, dead, crushed.
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  So watching one alive at around eight hundred meters calmly eating
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  a red jellyfish, that's rare.
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  That's a window into the behavior we almost never get to see.
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  Now, one thing I wanna point out, they just didn't aim a camera and guess.
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  They used imaging systems built at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute,
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  including a laser scanner that can capture the 3D shape of a soft, transparent
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  animal without ever touching it.
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  And they ran genetic analysis on some samples to confirm new species fast.
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  So this is a new way of doing deep-sea biology.
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  Look, don't grab.
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  Scan, don't destroy.
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  For fragile animals that fall apart the second you put them
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  in a net, that's a big deal.
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  Now, part two, why this matters, and this is where it gets bigger
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  than a cool octopus video.
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  The chief scientist of this expedition, Karen Osborne, from the Smithsonian,
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  called the midwater the largest habitat on Earth, and she's right.
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  By volume, the open midwater is the biggest living space on the planet.
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  It's the most room that life on Earth actually has, and
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  we've barely even seen it.
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  Here's a number that stopped me cold.
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  A study published in 2025 in the journal Science Advances tried to
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  work out how much of the deep seafloor humans have actually looked at with
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  cameras, not mapped from above, actually seen with our own eyes.
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  The answer?
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  Less than one-thousandth of a percent, zero point zero zero one percent.
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  The researchers said that's a patch of deep seafloor smaller than
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  the state of Rhode Island for the entire global ocean across nearly
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  seventy years of exploration.
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  And the little we have seen is lopsided.
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  That same study looked at about around 44,000 deep sea dives and found that about
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  two-thirds of all the visual observations were clustered near just three countries,
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  the United States, Japan, and New Zealand.
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  So we're not just missing most of the deep ocean.
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  We're trying to understand a global system from a tiny biased sample.
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  That's the sea floor.
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  The mid-water above it is even harder to reach and even less explored.
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  So when the team goes to Brazil and finds two dozen new species in a
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  matter of weeks, that's not a fluke.
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  That's the normal result of finally looking somewhere new.
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  Okay, but maybe you're thinking, "That's fascinating, but these are
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  tiny jellies three kilometers down.
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  Why should I care?" Here's why.
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  These animals are running a system that keeps our planet livable.
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  You've probably heard the ocean called the planet's lungs.
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  Here's the part that people miss.
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  A reason the ocean pulls carbon out of the atmosphere is because
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  of the animals in that midwater.
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  Tiny plankton at the surface soak up carbon dioxide.
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  They get eaten and packaged into waste and dead material, and it all sinks.
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  Little animals in the midwater grab it, eat it, repackage it, and drive it deeper.
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  Some of them even swim up to feed at night and sink back down by the day, carrying
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  carbon with them like a conveyor belt.
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  Scientists call this the biological carbon pump, and the scale is enormous.
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  Estimates vary from study to study, but the ocean's biological pump moves
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  somewhere between five and 12 million tons of carbon from the surface
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  toward the deep every single year.
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  A lot of the carbon can stay locked away for a century or more.
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  Without those midwater animals doing that work, there would be
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  far more carbon dioxide sitting in our atmosphere right now.
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  So those weird, fragile, glowing animals off the coast of Brazil,
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  they're not just a sideshow.
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  They're part of a machinery that regulates the climate you live in.
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  And they're a food base for the fish, the squid, and the whales that a lot
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  of people depend on Now, quick pause.
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  If this is landing for you, if you're looking at the deep ocean a little
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  differently right now, share this episode with one person, just one.
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  Text it to somebody who loves the ocean or someone who has
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  never thought about it once.
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  Honestly, that's one of the most useful things you can
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  do, and it takes only seconds.
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  Okay, part three, and this is the part that turns a lot of this from
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  nature documentary into a decision.
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  Because at the same time we're discovering how alive and how important
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  the midwater is, there's a serious push to start mining below it.
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  It's called deep-sea mining.
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  The target is the sea floor thousands of meters down, where valuable metals sit
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  in potato-sized lumps called nodules.
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  Cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese, metals used in batteries and electronics.
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  Companies want to send machines down to scrape and vacuum
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  those nodules off the bottom.
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  Now, there's a connection to everything, as I just told you.
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  Mining the sea floor doesn't stay on the sea floor.
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  The machine kicks up huge clouds of sediment, and to run the equipment,
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  operators pump material up to the ship, then discharge the leftover
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  slurry back into the water.
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  That creates plumes, clouds of fine sediment drifting through the midwater.
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  The exact zone that's all full of these fragile animals that are so important to
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  the ocean and so important to the planet.
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  And here's the problem, and this is backed by research.
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  Midwater animals evolve in some of the clearest, calmest,
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  most stable water on Earth.
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  There's normally almost no sediment out there, and so they are not built for mud.
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  Scientists warn that fine particles can clog the feeding structures of
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  filter feeders and the breathing structures of small fish.
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  The ones that filter carbon out of the water, their delicate mucus
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  filters can get completely clogged.
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  For jellies and siphonophores, sediment sticking to their bodies can throw
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  off their buoyancy, their basic ability to stay where they need to be.
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  There's a lab study on deep sea jellyfish, the helmet jellyfish published in
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  the journal Nature Communications.
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  The researchers exposed it to sediment like you'd get from a mining plume, and
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  the stress response from the sediment was more severe than the stress response from
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  a four-degree jump in water temperature.
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  Sit with that for a second.
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  For this animal, the mud was worse than extreme warming.
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  And these plumes don't stay small.
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  Because the midwater is one connected, moving system, scientists warn
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  plumes could spread for tens or even thousands of kilometers, and some of
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  the metals released could linger in the water for a very, very long time.
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  So put it all together.
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  We have barely explored the largest habitat on Earth.
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  We're discovering that it's full of unknown life, doing critical
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  work for the climate, and we're on the edge of industrializing
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  it before we understand it.
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  Here's the hopeful part, and it's real.
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  This is not decided yet.
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  The body that governs mining in international waters is called the
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  International Seabed Authority, the ISA.
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  And so far, they have not finished the rule book that would allow
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  full commercial mining to start.
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  Meanwhile, the pressure is building the other way.
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  As of twenty twenty-six, around forty countries have formally called
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  for a pause, a moratorium or an outright ban on deep sea mining
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  until the science catches up.
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  And here's a detail that I love.
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  Two of those countries are Canada, my country, and Brazil.
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  Brazil right off one of the coasts this expedition just found all this new life.
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  So this is one of those rare moments where the door is still open, the
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  decision is still being made, and public pressure genuinely matters here.
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  So here's a takeaway I wanna leave you with.
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  The deep ocean is not empty.
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  It is not a wasteland.
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  It's the largest living space on Earth.
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  It's full of animals we're only just meeting, and it's quietly
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  helping hold our climate together.
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  And we're lucky.
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  We're getting to see its face right at the moment we decide what to do with it.
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  Right now, that choice is still ours to make.
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  Now, like always, let's make this doable.
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  i'm not gonna pretend that you can stop a mining ship from your couch.
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  But here are a few honest, real things that you can do this week.
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  One, go watch the footage.
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  The Schmidt Ocean Institute puts its dives on YouTube for free,
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  and many of them stream live.
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  Search Stream Ocean Institute and just watch a dive.
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  See the octopus for yourself.
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  When people can picture what's down there, they start to care about it.
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  That's not nothing.
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  That's how movement starts.
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  Two, find out where your country stands on deep sea mining.
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  If you're in Canada and Brazil, your government has already backed a pause.
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  So a quick thank you note to your representative helps reinforce it.
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  If you're somewhere that hasn't, that's a short, polite email worth sending.
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  Keep it simple.
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  Just ask them to support a precautionary pause until the science is in.
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  Three, follow the science and share it.
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  Groups like the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
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  Institute, and the Ocean Discovery League are doing this work out in the open.
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  Follow them.
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  Share a clip.
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  Every share puts these animals in front of someone who's never seen them.
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  And four, a slower one.
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  A lot of the demand for deep sea metals is tied to batteries, so anything that
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  supports using less or reusing more, recycling your old electronics properly,
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  supporting better battery recycling, backing the companies working on it,
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  chips away at the argument that we have no choice but to mine the deep sea.
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  We do have choices.
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  None of these fix it overnight, but this is a fight about
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  attention as much as anything else.
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  For most of history, the deep sea's biggest problem was
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  simply that nobody was looking.
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  You're looking.
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  You looking and caring and passing it on changes that.
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  That's the episode for today.
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  If you got something out of this, follow the show, share it with one person,
• 12:25
  and we'll see you in the next one.
• 12:27
  I wanna thank you so much for joining me, and if you wanna support the
• 12:29
  podcast stuff I do on the podcast, on YouTube, as well as on TikTok,
• 12:34
  Instagram, and Facebook, please feel free to go to speakupforblue.com/patreon
• 12:39
  and support the effort I do on Patreon.
• 12:41
  That's speakupforblue.com/patreon.
• 12:44
  I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the
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  How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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  I am your host, Andrew Lewin.
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  Have a great day.
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  We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.