#mbari

day 27: community 🍽️

Slow your scroll and spend some quality time with this awesome amphipod. 🤩⁠

With a transparent body, the crystal amphipod, Cystisoma magna, is essentially invisible in the dim waters of the ocean’s twilight zone. Most of their cousins grow no bigger than your fingernail, but the crystal amphipod can fill your entire hand. And unlike many other hyperiids who live life hidden as hitchhikers, crystal amphipods swim freely in the open water. Living out in the open with nowhere to hide requires a different kind of stealth. ⁠ With the help of MBARI’s ships and deep-sea robots, our researchers and their collaborators revealed the secret to the crystal amphipod’s invisibility. Their exoskeleton is covered in microscopic shaggy structures or a fine coating of biofilm. Tiny spherical bacteria, only nanometers in diameter, work like the anti-reflective coating on eyeglasses to help Cystisoma camouflage in an environment that is sorely lacking in places to hide from hungry predators.

The crystal amphipod faces a fragile future. As industries look to the deep seafloor for mining precious metals, even animals living far above the bottom are at risk. Mining these metals will release plumes of dirty wastewater into the ocean’s twilight zone, clouding the crystal amphipod’s vision and interfering with their invisible superpower.

November 2024

Location: Monterey, California

Join Monterey Bay Aquarium, @mbari-blog and FathomVerse as we cozy up to the ocean’s hidden wonders all month long with daily deep-sea art prompts.

Let the unique beauty of this extraordinary ocean ecosystem spark inspiration as the days turn dark and chilly. Dive into these prompts and create daily art in any medium–digital, ink, sculpture, tattoos, macaroni art, or whatever calls to you from the depths.

We’ll be reblogging art all month long, so make sure to follow @MontereyBayAquarium and @mbari-blog and tag your posts #deep sea december. Here’s some other ways to keep the sea-lebration going all month long: 🩵 Come chat with fellow artists and share your creations in the Monterey Bay Aquarium Discord server.

🩵 Submit your art to our online gallery.

🩵 Download the FathomVerse mobile game to find inspiration while contributing to MBARI deep-sea research. By protecting the ocean, we can all work together to preserve the unique and fragile beauty of the deep sea that inspires us to create. There’s wonder in ocean life, and caring for it helps us all. 🖤

The list of plain text prompts is available under the cut:

I've never been to @montereybayaquarium but I hope to someday!

Late for Day 28: Descend for @montereybayaquarium @DeepSeaDecember