Last Post From The Indian Ocean Gyre: Unidentified Swimming Objects
By Stiv Wilson on April 03, 2010
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"What on EARTH is that??"
Yesterday, we found perhaps the strangest organism we've ever seen in a trawl. Wrapped around a broken plastic coffee scoop was a silvery, eel-like fish as long as a pencil, with tiny, spines lining its sinewy body. Its body shape suggested it swam vertically.
No one has any idea what it is, not even the marine scientists on board. Our resident naturalist/author Redmond O Hanlin has a very fun hypothesis, but we won't bias you with his guess yet. Can anyone out there ID this fascinating creature?
2 days from Mauritius, and we're undoubtedly seeing an increase in plastic. This morning's trawl was full of trash - a broken cup, piece of a bowl, loads of broken down plastic film, and dozens of fragments, along with 6 small triggerfish, 5 pterapods, a few pelagic crabs, a strange, broccoli-like sea plant, several halobates (marine water skeeters), and another tiny, unidentified fish, possibly related to the Sargassum fish.
By the next blog entry, we will have either spotted land or landed. An incredible voyage coming to a close - and a third oceanic gyre now explored for plastic pollution. Though our research here will end tomorrow, the Beagle crew has agreed to continue gathering samples en route to Cape Town, hopefully coming closer to the center of the gyre. We will eagerly await their findings.
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Tags
Indian Ocean Gyre Indian Ocean Garbage Patch First Ever Exploration Indian Ocean Plastic Plastic Debris Indian Ocean 5 Gyres Anna Cummins Marcus Eriksen
10 Comments 
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cozmsbrpng
Apr 11, 2010 9:32 PM
congratulations on your successful trawls. I think your work is very important. Good luck recruiting more boats!
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anonymous writer D
Apr 09, 2010 8:48 AM
that is definently a baby oar fish i compared pictures on google and that is my finding to also compare you can type in baby oarfish on google images
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chuck norris
Apr 09, 2010 8:47 AM
i think this is just absurd......................
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marine savior
Apr 09, 2010 8:39 AM
i think that they should go to the most popular beaches and say people cant swim there because they poluted the beach, i think that would motivate people to clean up after themselves.
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octopus
Apr 06, 2010 5:13 PM
I think it might be a baby gulper eel. They typically have this shape whereby the mouth is much bigger than the rest of the body because they are usually found in the deep sea, where food is scarce so they have a very expandable stomach to eat things larger than themselves! But like most deep sea organisms nothing is known about their life history, so even though it's a deep sea creature usually, maybe a baby got into the shallows somehow? Who knows?!
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stiv wilson
Apr 06, 2010 10:14 AM
Yup, it's a baby Oarfish.
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Manuel
Apr 04, 2010 7:08 PM
Oh my God, you killed Lowly Worm!!!
XD
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stiv wilson
Apr 04, 2010 6:59 AM
Yes, we think it's a baby oarfish
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Angie Tschopp[
Apr 03, 2010 7:03 PM
Is it a baby oarfish?
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Stepshep
Apr 03, 2010 3:56 PM
Maybe from the family Regalecidae? A baby fishy? Only elongated and scaleless fish type I could find...but I have to assume that it's very immature and not an adult. If it is an adult, that theory goes out the window as the fish should be much much larger by now.
