—What is that white thing floating ahead?
“It’s a nautilus!”
—A nautilus in the Nautilus! Dreams come true!
That was the relationship that the researchers had when they discovered what they had on their screens. Images of a sandy seabed streamed to monitors in the control tower aboard the Nautilusfrom where they had deployed the two investment teams with cameras, ROV Hercules y Atalanta, for the last descent of the year for the study they are carrying out on the geomorphology, diversity and density of the deep sea biology of the German Channel.
After more than a thousand expeditions with the robotic immersion equipment, he was before them and for the first time on video a nautilusthe animal from which their boat takes its name. But that is not the feat of the discovery. While the ship has been exploring the ocean for 15 years, the iconic marine mollusk has roamed the oceans for much longer and, for the first time, it could be seen clearly, live and everything was filmed.
The family Nautilidae, which is found in all the Indo-Pacific oceanoriginated during the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago. But the gender Nautilus appeared more recently, about 38 million years ago. However, the evolution of the nautilus dates back almost 500 million years through the remains of shells of their extinct ancestral species, as Marley Parker, one of the members of the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET) team that captured the image, explains in her blog.
Because their structure has changed so little over that immense period of time, nautiloids are often called “living fossils”. The specimen they were observing is called Palau nautilus of Nautilus belauensis which propels itself through the water with haste and agility, although it can stop moving and can live up to a couple of decades, the expert details in his blog. It also explains that there is a healthy and stable population in some regions, such as the one in which the sighting occurred, but in others They have been fished to near extinction for their shells. In fact, the situation is such that all nautilus species are protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
“We have never seen one with Hercules because the preferred depth range of these animals is shallower than most of our ROV dives and the boat has spent limited time in their home range. Here in Palau, the Nautilus Range extends from less than 90 meters to more than 500 meters. when we send Hercules y Atalanta to the seabed, they often operate at depths of between 1,000 and 4,000 meters,” explains Parker, who points out that just that day the team was sliding at a depth of 380 meters, right in the middle of the nautilus territory.
