Photo/Charles Fisher, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Click for link.

The New York Times just published a wonderful look at the thinking of scientists about the fate of the many cold seeps in the Gulf of Mexico, something I’ve been pondering myself a fair bit over recent weeks. I’ve explored the venerable tube worms of cold-seeps before here before, but never in regard to rogue petrochemicals. The communities at these seeps live on oil and other hydrocarbons naturally seeping from the ocean floor, so whether a larger dose will harm them is an interesting question. The consensus for now seems to be probably yes, but we really don’t know.

Whatever you do, don’t miss the beautiful slide show of this fascinating and under-publicized ecosystem. Watch for the orange bacteria, a spectacular black coral, and for brittle stars that put the Lacoön to shame.

LOVE the swimming sea cucumber (first critter). It’s a starfish relative in the Echinoderms — which despite starfish’s radial symmetry are vetebrates’ closest living relatives!

I was especially piqued by this video because it was taken in March in the exact same spot I’d be snorkeling a month later — Kealakekua Bay, the place Captain Cook first came ashore on the Big Island in 1779, and the same spot he was killed later that year. Supposedly you can still see a pock mark on the cliff walls from one of Cook’s cannon balls. Topside, the bay contains the only piece of foreign soil I know of owned outright by a foreign government — a tiny plot given to the UK in the 19th century by the Kingdom of Hawaii. There stands Captain Cook’s obelisk, supposedly repainted every year by the Australian Navy and theoretically providing a tiny no-arrest zone for every Commonwealth or UK citizen running from the cops.

The gorgeous reef there is punctuated with percolating (and cold!) freshwater springs that drops swiftly downward into Pacific Ocean blue. You really feel as if you’re swimming in the ocean. I recall seeing a white-mouthed moray eel, loads of raccoonfish who were not shy about sidling up next to me, a puffer fish, and many other delights. Apparently, it’s also not unknown for the local spinner dolpins to swim in and roust about. Captain Cook’s monument was right next to me, and apparently, several hundred feet down, so were all these critters (you can rewatch the video with the IDs to compare:

The video footage shows a pelagic sea cucumber (apodid holothurian), Venus flytrap sea anemone (actinoscyphiid sea anemone), tipod fish (chlorophthalmid tipod fish), flatfish (pleuronectiform flatfish), eel (bongrid conger eel), shrimp (benthic caridean likely nematocarcinid shrimp), actiniid Bolocera-like sea anemone with a galatheid crab, Glass sponge and demospongid with hermit crab, and hexactinellid (glass) sponge next to a primnoid coral. Video Credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

Your tax dollars at work, my friends. Don’t say they’re never put to good use.

And to celebrate this milestone, I now present you the fabulous solution to a mystery we all pondered last year. Remember the Unidentified Feathery Object (aka the Ninja Seaweed)? Well, I just saw a video post on the Echinoblog today (which also includes video of the infamous sea pig!) that explains everything. Though it be still ninja, that’s no seaweed. It’s a space station! Wait. . . let me check my notes . . .

Ahem. For your viewing pleasure, I present . . . the hairy sea cucumber!

Hmmm. . . hairy sea cucumbers. I see nothing suggestive in that name at all. Nope.

It’s also quite apparent no one taught these sea cucumbers table manners. I mean, come on: shoving your whole tentacle into your mouth at once and slowly licking it clean? Sakes alive!

Sea cucumbers (even hairy ones) are echinoderms, which means they’re most closely related to sea stars, brittle stars, basket stars, and sea urchins. This sea cucumber is clearly a filter feeder, catching tiny animals and plants on its tentacles, though I can’t seem to find out if it uses glue, or stinging cells, or poison, or dumb luck. For the sea cucumber (aka holothurian) family . . . er, . . tree, see here. Follow “Holothuroidea” down to see the different sorts. And just for the record, I’d never heard of hairy sea cucumbers either.

We have cuke sign! Get your cucumber hooks ready! NOT a sea pig, but a close relative in the same group, the sea cucumbers, aka holothurians. Photo credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

OK, so the short answer is that a sea pig looks like a cross between a star-nosed mole, a naked mole rat, and a hallucinogen-induced, Cthulu-themed nightmare. Except cute. Awwwwwww! Can you get a sea piggy bank? Well, not exactly, but you can get something very close: a sea-through pig.

Wanna sea what I mean? To stop me from making any more bad puns, and to find out JUST WHAT THE HECK A SEA PIG IS, go here and find out all the wonderful details, courtesy the Echinoblog (via Deep Sea News). You’ll be glad you did. Thank you.