“The abyssal plain covers half of the surface of the Earth, but far less than one percent of it has ever been seen,” begins the trailer for new deep-sea documentary, How Deep Is Your Love. Thanks to the film, and the efforts of director Eleanor Mortimer and a team of biologists, we’ve now got a much closer look at one part of this plain, and the weird and wonderful marine creatures inhabiting it.
The exact location: the Clarion-Clipperton fracture zone in the Pacific. It’s about as remote as it gets—at least a 12-day voyage from any landmass. It’s an oceanographer’s paradise, teeming as it is with unknown life. After all, as the doc points out, around 90 percent of underwater life-forms have yet to be identified and named.
That naming process can take years, which is why the film crew and the scientists involved came up with nicknames for a lot of the creatures they came across. We’ve got Barbie Pig, a type of sea cucumber with a bright pink body, stubby “legs,” and spiky protuberances on top. There’s also the Ping Pong Sponge—what looks like a ping-pong ball on a stick—and the Headless Chicken Monster, a floating translucent sack containing vibrant, coiled innards. As for Caspar the Ghost Octopus, you can probably guess what it looks like from the name.
Some of the species caught on camera have been identified before, but got nicknames anyway. For example: the sea cucumber Psychropotes semperiana, with a distinctive raised “sail,” goes by the moniker of “gummy squirrel.” There’s also the chunky, purplish Psychronaetes hanseni sea cucumber, nicknamed “The King.”
Despite the funny names, however, there’s a serious message to the film. The seabed, some 3 miles under the waves, is a target for industrial mining. One of the big questions the documentary asks is whether the benefits gained from mining outweigh the potential environmental costs. Similarly, How Deep Is Your Love doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of scientific work like this either. To be properly studied and identified, creatures must be captured, killed, and brought to the surface, a process that the film soberly chronicles.
“It’s the challenge of the deep sea,” Mortimer told The Guardian. “Most people never go there, and yet it’s a huge part of our planet we need to connect with. That was the motive behind the film. I want people to fall in love with the deep sea, I want people to connect with it.”
That, of course, is where the Barbie Pig’s star turn comes in.
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Lead Image: Luna Films
