Oil Rigs and Sperm Whales - Amazing

Down at 3000' in the Gulf of Mexico a drill teams ROV is doing a visual search of ongoing drilling operations.

That's when things got very, very interesting:

ROV's and Enypniastes eximia

Oceaneering has joined the SERPENT (scientific and environmental ROV partnership using existing industrial technology) project to collect images of unknown deep sea creatures and rarely seen organisms, evaluate the offshore drilling environment, and gather sediment samples.

The SERPENT project is a collaboration of scientific partners, institutions, and a network of oil and gas operators and contractors who specialize in utilizing remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).

The SERPENT Project’s Dr. Daniel Jones confirmed the sea creature to be a deepwater swimming sea cucumber (holothurian) called Enypniastes eximia. When Oceaneering ROV pilots saw the creature they named it “The Headless Chicken Fish,” although it does not have a commonly accepted name.

Best Undersea Critter Ever!

If it were not for the Internet critters like these would remain in some lab, in a bottle somewhere, or in some obscure journal on a dusty back shelf.

Fortunately we live in a more enlightened age.

What you are looking at is Macropinna microstoma, brought to you by our all time favorite underwater website/news archive Underwater Times - the grandaddy of all online underwater sites. Kudos and double kudos to Jeff Dudas for this story.

Macropinna is currently being studied at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute by researchers Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler (another reason to live in California) using ROV's in the deep waters just offshore of Central California. This unlikely looking critter can be found at depths of 2,000 to 2,600 feet.

Magnapinna Squid-Perhaps, Perhaps

We got the following email this morning about that face hugger critter found at 7800 feet back in November of 2007. We had an ident of Magnapinna perhaps the scariest looking critter you would ever not want to meet free diving at night. The email is from the ROV company who caught this on tape.

Now we're not so sure about the ident, here's the email, anyone out there know what this is?

Gentlemen,

I work as Senior Project Engineer for DOF Subsea Australia. I am on secondment to one of our companies in as you can see from my email signature below. We're an engineering and offshore services contractor to the oil and gas industry. We also perform all kinds of offshore work and recently you may have seen our team and one of our survey vessels was responsible for the locating of the HMAS Sydney. A long lost battleship of the Australian Navy that was sunk in battle in WW2.

We design and fabricate and install all manner of equipment and systems in all corners of the oceans. We have dedicated vessels from which we perform all our work and on these vessels we carry a full survey crew, an ROV crew for each onboard ROV, Saturation Diving crews, marine crew, deck crew and engineering staff. Within the travels we have collected large amounts of digital footage recorded from at least one of the 7 onboard cameras of the ROV(s) (some vessels have two) and share them amongst ourselves. I have attached the footage of the squid????? as described.

You can see from the title that the ROV boys have named it “Creature” you’ll see why. From the video overlay you can see the Eastings and Northings for the location in the Gulf from the onboard survey systems and the depth as recorded by the onboard ROV instruments.

Anyway if you can indent this let me know.

Company website

Giant Squid vs ROV 0-1

Huzzah! More Giant Squid news this week. Well, unless the ROV in this video is 60 feet across, perhaps not a Giant Squid but squiddy video news none the less...and we'll take it.

A huge squid was caught on underwater camera attacking a ROV at around 1650 ft water depth in the Gulf of Mexico. The ROV hydraulic arm made an attempt to nudge the squid away but it held on firmly to its target until it gave up and left:

Squid Video of Magnapinna Focus! Focus!

It's been what, 3 months, since we blogged about anything remotely squiddy?

Today changes all that as news surfaces from internal Shell Oil emails and an rov video featuring Magnapinna which looks like that "face hugger critter" from the movie series Alien. This one was filmed at a crushing depth over 2 kilometers down.

The video is evidence of how, as oil and gas industry ROVs dive deeper and stay down longer, they are yielding valuable footage of deep-sea animals.



Some biologists have even formed partnerships with oil companies, allowing scientists to share camera time on corporate rov's--though critics worry about possible conflicts of interest.