The Top 10 Deep-Sea Animals (according to Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scientists)

Summary

Monterey Bay Aquarium and MBARI scientists count down their top 10 deep-sea animals, celebrating the strange, beautiful, and highly adapted creatures that thrive in the ocean’s darkest habitats. The list features everything from the undulating Tomopteris worm and the fireworks-like Crossota jelly to the fierce-looking Pacific viperfish and the strawberry squid with mismatched eyes. Viewers also meet the feather star, the creepy Phronima amphipod, the heat-loving Pompeii worm, the red-and-rainbow bloody belly comb jelly, the misunderstood vampire squid, and the unforgettable barreleye fish. Along the way, the scientists explain how each animal survives, hunts, hides, or moves in extreme conditions. The video ends by emphasizing that even in one of the world’s best-studied deep-ocean regions, there are still plenty of discoveries left to make.

Highlights

• Tomopteris worms’ swimming and turning skills are so advanced that researchers want to reverse-engineer them 🤖
• Crossota jelly is a rare little beauty that vanishes almost instantly when bothered 🎆
• The Pacific viperfish’s jaw is built to trap prey like a cage, not just look scary 🦷
• Strawberry squid have one big eye for silhouettes and one smaller eye for bioluminescence ✨
• Feather stars can “walk” through water in a way that feels almost magical 🌟
• Phronima amphipods live up to their creepy reputation with a truly bizarre reproductive strategy 😬
• Pompeii worms live in a hot-cold balancing act near vents, with bacteria helping protect them 🧫
• Bloody belly comb jellies shimmer with rainbow-like light as they move through the water 🌈
• Vampire squid are less Dracula and more deep-sea garbage collectors, feeding on sinking detritus 🗑️
• Barreleye fish have transparent heads and upward-looking eyes that can rotate to track prey above them 🔭

Key Takeaways

• Deep-sea animals have some seriously wild adaptations for survival down there 🌊
• The Tomopteris worm is basically a tiny underwater dance machine 💃
• Crossota jelly looks like fireworks and can jet away when disturbed ✨
• The Pacific viperfish uses huge teeth like a trap to keep prey from escaping 🦷
• The strawberry squid has different eyes for different kinds of light 👀
• Feather stars can seem plant-like one moment and then swim away the next 🌸
• Phronima amphipods are tiny but absolutely nightmare fuel in the best way 😱
• Pompeii worms survive extreme heat near hydrothermal vents 🔥
• Bloody belly comb jellies are red to help them hide in the deep sea ❤️
• The barreleye fish has transparent head features and rotating eyes that make it unforgettable 🐟

Overview

This video is basically a love letter to deep-sea weirdness. MBARI scientists each share the animals that amaze them most, and the list is packed with creatures that look like they were invented for a sci-fi movie. From glowing jellies to jaw-dropping fish, every animal has a strange and useful adaptation that helps it survive in the deep ocean.

What makes the countdown fun is that the scientists don’t just name the animals — they explain why they’re fascinating. Some are admired for elegance, like the Tomopteris worm or feather star. Others get attention for being unsettling, such as Phronima or the Pacific viperfish. And then there are the animals with downright bizarre biology, like the vampire squid and barreleye fish.

The bigger message is that the deep sea still holds tons of surprises. Even in Monterey Bay, one of the most studied stretches of ocean on Earth, researchers are still finding new species and behaviors. The video leaves you with that classic deep-ocean feeling: wonder, curiosity, and the sense that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s down there.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction to MBARI’s Deep-Sea Favorites This introduction sets up the segment by explaining that MBARI researchers continually discover remarkable deep-sea wildlife, and the host is sharing their top ten favorite animals. It begins the countdown with the Tomopteris worm, highlighted for its graceful undulating swimming and impressive maneuverability that even inspires robotic research.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Tomopteris Worm: The Glowing Pelagic Worm MBARI introduces its top deep-sea animals, with Tomopteris worm ranked #10, and Shannon Johnson explains her excitement about these worms despite most people not finding worms interesting.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Anglerfish: A Face Full of Teeth The chapter introduces the strawberry squid, a deep-sea squid with one large eye for spotting silhouettes above and one smaller eye for detecting bioluminescent pinpoints, highlighting how its strange features are perfectly suited to life in the deep sea.
• 05:00 - 07:30: Strawberry Squid and Deep-Sea Vision Pompeii worms live on hydrothermal vents near underwater volcanic heat, where they survive extreme temperatures by sheltering with bacterial coatings, extracting minerals, and extending their gills into cooler water to breathe.
• 07:30 - 10:00: Pompeii Worms and Life at Hydrothermal Vents This segment explains how vampire squid feed despite their misleading name: they do not suck blood, but instead use sticky filaments to collect sinking dead animals and waste drifting from the surface, a unique feeding strategy among cephalopods.
• 10:00 - 12:00: Vampire Squid and Marine Snow Feeding The chapter appears to conclude immediately with a brief closing message, offering no substantive discussion of vampire squid or marine snow feeding within the provided transcript segment.
• 12:00 - 12:30: Wrapping Up: Wonder of the Deep Ocean The chapter wraps up the video with a brief closing message, thanking viewers for watching and concluding the journey through the wonders of the deep ocean.

The Top 10 Deep-Sea Animals (according to Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute scientists) Transcription

• Segment 1: 00:00 - 02:30 Hey everyone, Patrick from the Monterey Bay Aquarium here. Our colleagues at MBARI are always finding amazing wildlife in the deep sea. And everything they show us, at the Aquarium, is the coolest thing that we've ever seen! But we've always wondered, what are their favorites? So here they are, these are MBARI's top ten deep sea animals. [Music] [Text on screen: 10 — Tomopteris worm] [Shannon Johnson] I have spent my entire career trying to get people excited about worms. Because most of the time when people think about worms, they think about the earthworms, and they're not that fun to look at. Tomopteris worms, they do this amazing undulating dance in order to swim around and feed. [Kakani Katija] The animal is able to swim really rapidly, maneuver very tight turns, and it can stop on a dime by arresting the motion of all of its legs, and then reverse direction without changing the direction of its body. And so it's pretty incredible what these small animals are able to do and no robotic system has been able to replicate it. So they're something we're definitely interested in trying to reverse-engineer. [Music] [Text on screen: 9 — Crossota jelly] [George Matsumoto] Crossota millsae, when you first look at it it, looks like fireworks are going off in the evening sky! It is just a gorgeous animal. It's got tentacles that go off in every direction. And then if you disturb it a little bit it pulls everything in and jets off in a different direction. And it's like it wasn't even there. [Susan von Thun] It's an animal we see every once in a while. It's not very common. It's a beautiful tiny little jelly. These rare gems, we get really excited when we see them! [Music] [Text on screen: 8 — Pacific viperfish] The Pacific viperfish is a great example of many things we notice about deep-sea fish. It has long sharp teeth. .. [Bruce Robison] It makes them look fierce, and I think the result is that they are fierce, at least to their prey. [Kakani] Their teeth are so large, and they sit outside of its mouth,
• Segment 2: 00:00 - 02:30 that it can't actually close its mouth. [Susan] These giant teeth are not actually impaling anything. The teeth act like bars on a jail cell to keep the food, say a shrimp, from swimming back out of the mouth.
• Segment 3: 02:30 - 05:00 [Music] [Text on screen: 7 — Strawberry squid] [George] One of the other types of animals we find in the deep sea is this beautiful squid. And we've given it the name the strawberry squid, because when you look at it from the side it has all these little dots that make it sort of look like a strawberry. It has one big eye and one small eye. [Bruce] It has one really big eye in order to see the shadows or silhouettes of potential prey against the lighted waters above. Its other eye is small. And it's designed to see pinpoints of bioluminescence. It's bizarre to us because they seem ill-suited to survival in our world. But in the deep sea, they're perfectly well adapted. [Music] [Text on screen: 6 — Feather star] [Susan] Feather stars are these animals that are related to seastars and they live on the seafloor. [Shannon] They look like a flower that can't move but then all of a sudden they'll swim off into the darkness. [Kakani] I love seeing things swim. And to me the feather star and the way they swim, it's almost like they're walking through water. It's pretty incredible to watch. [Music] [Text on screen: 5 — Phronima amphipod] [Shannon] Oh, Phronima! They look like a nightmare but they're really amazing. [Susan] Phronima is this amphipod which is basically like a little shrimplike animal. And they take another animal, like a salp, they go inside, kill it, eat out the insides and then lay their eggs in the dead carcass of this animal. It's like the creepiest thing ever! [George] She's got these big eyes, and these big claws, and she looks really scary if she wasn't only, you know, an inch long! [Music] [Text on screen: 4 — Pompeii worm]
• Segment 4: 05:00 - 07:30 [Shannon] Pompeii worms are one of the most thermo-tolerant animals in the world. These crazy little fuzzy wuzzy worms, live on hydrothermal vents. It's essentially an underwater volcano with piping hot water coming out of it. [George] The temperatures can get 200 degrees Celsius. We're talking hot! And the Pompeii worms seems to thrive in these temperatures. [Shannon] How they do this is they have a fleece-like coating of bacteria, that helps protect them from some of the hottest water that comes out of the vents so that they can extract minerals from the vents. And then they extend their gills out into much cooler water, which is how they breathe and extract oxygen out of the water. They do this little dance in between the cooler water and the hotter water. In and out of their tubes. So they're like hot, hot, hot -- cool, cool, cool! [Music] [Text on screen: 3 — Bloody belly comb jelly] [George] Bloody belly comb jelly is one of my personal favorites. And I have to admit I'm a little bit biased, because I was fortunate enough to be one of the researchers who described this beautiful animal. [Shannon] Most animals in the deep sea can't see the color red. And so in order to hide really well, the bloody bellies are this beautiful bright red color. [Kakani] I think they look like hearts. That's nerdy. .. They do! [Susan] The bloody belly comb jelly has these eight rows called teen rows. And that's how the animal moves around. The light flickering that you see, is light bouncing off of these little hairlike projections on the body of the animal. [George] They defract the light into the colors of the rainbow. And so it looks like the most beautiful animal, with eight rows of rainbows moving through the water. [Music] [Text on screen: 2 — Vampire squid] [George] Vampire squid is an animal that's captured people's imagination for years. Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid from the depths, or the inferno.
• Segment 5: 07:30 - 10:00 [Kakani] For the longest time we weren't sure what vampire squid actually ate. [Shannon] I mean it sounds like kind of a blood sucker, right? [George] The vampire squid doesn't suck blood. The vampire squid likes to eat poop raining down from the surface. This is how it gets its food. [Kakani] They stick out this feeding tentacle that captures sinking dead animals and waste that's raining down from near the sea surface. It's gross. .. [Bruce] The filaments are sticky. They're kind of like half of a velcro strip. The vampires drag this filament behind them, collect all kinds of bits and pieces of drifting matter. That's a unique feeding mode that we don't see in any other cephalopods. [Susan] Why did this animal get its name, vampire squid? We're not actually really sure. It's not nearly as scary as it sounds. [George] But the vampire squid's a cool name! [Music] [Text on screen: 1 — Barreleye fish] [Susan] Probably the most common question I get, is "what's the weirdest thing you've ever seen in the deep sea?" And I really have to say the barreleye, because there is no example of a fish that looks like that! [Bruce] The barreleye is an amazing fish. When we first came across one alive, in its natural habitat, we were really surprised! [Kakani] The animal's eyes, you might think, are looking forward--those little black dots. But in actuality, the green orbs that are pointed upwards, are its eyes. Covered in this gelatinous sheath which is completely transparent. [Bruce] They have this tiny little poochie mouth sticking out in front. And the eyes were looking up! There was no way that the fish could see what it was eating, which always bothered me! What's the point? How does this work? [Susan] Our scientists discovered that the eyes can rotate, so that it can keep its eye on the prey above it, and just rotate and grab the food. [Music] [Bruce] Monterey Bay is the best studied patch of deep ocean on the planet. And yet we're still finding new things every time we go out.
• Segment 6: 07:30 - 10:00 It's exciting to think that there's that much more to be discovered in the rest of the world ocean.
• Segment 7: 10:00 - 12:30 Thanks for watching!