Wild life in the Hawaiian deep: new photo archive

When you get down into the deep ocean, it’s not just more of the same.

The creatures of the deep are different—so different that some don’t even look like creatures.

(Images: A couple of shots from the Hawai`i Undersea Research Laboratory deep sea creature collection include the outrageously spiky crab Lethodidae neolithodes and the impressively patterned starfish Pentaceraster cumingi. Credit: HURL.)

To help understand the amazing diversity of deep ocean life around the Islands, the Hawai`i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL), which has been photographing them for more than 30 years, has created an online identification guide.

The resource was once access-limited to scientists—it is loaded onto iPads that submersible staffs can take along for critter identification--but is now publicly available, here.

You’ll find there more than 1,500 images, some of them still shots and others taken from videos, that have been collected during deep dives by the University of Hawai`i’s various manned and remotely operated submersibles.

A press release with more details on the program is available here.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2012