MORE MONTEREY

I can’t resist this stuff. The other two deep sea projects at the Monterey Bay Aquarium are equally as interesting as the first: Investigate a Sunken Whale and Map Undersea Mountains. I also discovered that each of the missions has a video attached to it. The alien creatures video is wild. A must sea (oh, come on, I get one pun a week). The Sunken Whale video is not as spectacular, but the whale bones are so huge it is worth a watch just for the contrast in size between the bones and the fish and crabs. And, of course, no discussion of the deep sea would be complete without a list of more fast facts from those amazing Monterey scientists:

* The bones of a large dead whale can provide food for deep-sea animals for over 50 years.
* About 200 different species of seafloor animals have been found on a single whale skeleton.
* Osedax worms, which live only on whalefalls, have no eyes, legs, mouths, or stomachs, but they do have colorful feathery plumes and green “roots.” These roots are filled with bacteria that help the worms adsorb nutrients from whale bones.
* More than 30,000 seamounts lie hidden beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean but only a handful have ever been explored.
* Most seamounts are volcanoes that erupted out of the seafloor. Some ran out of lava before rising to the sea surface. Others churned out enough lava to reach the sea surface, then sank slowly into the depths after their lava supply ran out and they cooled.
* Deep-water corals on Davidson Seamount, off the Big Sur coast, may grow to ten feet tall and live for several hundred years.