"The Deep"

Book Showcases Previously Unseen Sea Creatures

French wildlife journalist Claire Nouvian has put together a book of newly discovered sea life called "The Deep." Her work demonstrates new techniques scientists are employing to discover and document these creatures.

SPENCER MICHELS: While the deep sea has long tantalized humans, it's only been in the last century that exploration has been technically possible. And only recently have scientists started realizing the immensity of what lies far below the surface.

French wildlife producer and journalist Claire Nouvian became obsessed with life in the deep ocean about five years ago, after a visit to California's Monterey Bay Aquarium. She started going on ocean expeditions, and she began to collect photographs taken by scientists of life that exists in darkness far below the surface.

She's put 200 of the most spectacular into a new book called "The Deep," photos of exotic and never-before-seen animals: a rare jellyfish; an almost cute octopus; heat-loving worms; and a variety of scary-looking fish. Many of these creatures have not even been named, they are so newly discovered.

CLAIRE NOUVIAN, Author, "The Deep": That's really where we come from. Life originated in the water.

SPENCER MICHELS: I talked with her in an underwater observation tunnel at San Francisco's Aquarium of the Bay.

CLAIRE NOUVIAN: I had been doing wildlife films, so I thought I knew what animals were pretty much like on this planet, and I was really amazed to see that there was this huge chunk of my wildlife culture that was missing. I just was really stunned. I mean, my mind was blown.
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SPENCER MICHELS: Water makes up 70 percent of the Earth's surface, with ocean depth averaging more than two miles, a huge habitat that scientists say may contain from 10 million to 30 million new species.
Steve Haddock, a marine biologist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, took many of the photos in Nouvian's book. He and other MBARI scientists use unmanned, remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, tethered to a surface ship to explore and photograph deep canyons off Monterey on the California coast.

STEVE HADDOCK, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute: With a remotely operated vehicle, we may have 12 scientists there watching, experiencing the dive simultaneously. So we can have an expert on squid and an expert on jellyfish there, kind of weighing in on what they're seeing. And we have high-definition video now, and we have the ability to collect these really fragile animals in excellent shape.

SPENCER MICHELS: Haddock says ocean researchers have to be good, quick photographers.

STEVE HADDOCK: If you talk to people who work on jellyfish, you find out that a lot of them actually end up being photographers. And it's almost a requirement, because most of these animals, once you get them up on deck, you can't preserve them. They're so fragile that you can't just pick them and put them on a shelf and study them later.

SPENCER MICHELS: He snapped the picture of a two-inch-long creature called an arrow worm.

STEVE HADDOCK: Supposedly one of the second most abundant organisms out there in the ocean, but, you know, probably seems pretty foreign to most people...