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Lives 6,000 meters below the surface
Has sensors in their fins to find prey
Sits calmly and lets small prawns, fish, and  crustaceans to flow into their mouths on the current

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About the Sperm Whale

Sperm whales are easily recognized by their massive heads and prominent rounded foreheads.

Spermaceti and Diving Capabilities

They have the largest brain of any creature known to have lived on Earth. Their heads also hold large quantities of a substance called spermaceti. Whalers once believed that the oily fluid was sperm, but scientists still do not understand the function of spermaceti. One common theory is that the fluid-which hardens to wax when cold-helps the whale alter its buoyancy so it can dive deep and rise again. Sperm whales are known to dive as deep as 3,280 feet in search of squid to eat. These giant mammals must hold their breath for up to 90 minutes on such dives.

These toothed whales eat thousands of pounds of fish and squid-about one ton per day.

Sperm whales are often spotted in groups (called pods) of some 15 to 20 animals. Pods include females and their young, while males may roam solo or move from group to group. Females and calves remain in tropical or subtropical waters all year long, and apparently practice communal childcare. Males migrate to higher latitudes, alone or in groups, and head back towards the equator to breed. Driven by their tale fluke, approximately 16 feet from tip to tip, they can cruise the oceans at around 23 miles per hour.

These popular leviathans are vocal and emit a series of "clangs" that may be used for communication or for echolocation. Animals that use echolocation emit sounds that travel underwater until they encounter objects, then bounce back to their senders-revealing the location, size, and shape of their target.

Sperm whales were mainstays of whaling's 18th and 19th century heyday. A mythical albino sperm whale was immortalized in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, though Ahab's nemesis was apparently based on a real animal whalers called Mocha Dick. The animals were targeted for oil and ambergris, a substance that forms around squid beaks in a whale's stomach. Ambergris was (and remains) a very valuable substance once used in perfumes.

Despite large population drops due to whaling, sperm whales are still fairly numerous.

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About the Sperm Whale Sperm whales are easily recognized by their massive heads and prominent rounded foreheads. Spermaceti and Diving Capabilities They have the largest brain of any creature known to have lived on Earth. Their heads also hold large quantities of a substance called spermaceti.

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Discover the facts behind a legendary denizen of the deep. Explore the mysteries of their lives in the abyss.

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10" eyes
Little is known about them, since they where first filmed in 2004, and it is hard to film them at the depth that they live at

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Also called the pointy-nosed blue chimaera
Newly discovered
Hard to get data, due to the fact that the best and only why to catch this animal causes it to die by the time it reaches the surface.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7ByiYbCYM

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Second largest whale species
Able to hunt and kill giant squids
Able to hold their breath for up to 90 minutes
They eat about a ton of fish and squid daily
Uses clanges to find their way around under water

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Dive deep deep down into the ocean, long past the point where the sun's rays can penetrate, and you will enter the realm of the ghost sharks.

Also called chimaeras, ghost sharks are dead-eyed, wing-finned fish rarely seen by people.

Relatives of sharks and rays, these deep-sea denizens split off from these other groups some 300 million years ago. Even though ghost sharks have been gliding through the depths since long before the dinosaurs, we still know very little about them. Now, video recently released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California has shined new light on these mysterious creatures.

In 2009, the institute sent a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, on several dives to depths of up to 6,700 feet in waters off California and Hawaii. They weren't looking for ghost sharks: "The guys doing the video were actually geologists," says Dave Ebert, program director for the Pacific Shark Research Center at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. ( See more amazing shark pictures.)

"Normally, people probably wouldn't have been looking around in this area, so it's a little bit of dumb luck," he says.

One fish the ROV kept running into looked like a new ghost shark, since it did not resemble ghost shark species known to frequent either of these regions.

To find out its identity, the institute reached out to Ebert and other chimaera experts. The team analyzed the video and now believe it's a pointy-nosed blue chimaera ( Hydrolagus trolli), a species usually found near Australia and New Zealand, according to a recent study in the journal Marine Biodiversity Records.

Though the ghost shark is not new to science, it's still exciting: The video is the first time the pointy-nosed blue chimaera has been seen alive in its natural habitat.

Uncovering Lost Sharks

If Ebert and colleagues are correct, the video is also the first discovery of this species in the Northern Hemisphere.

But they can't be sure unless they get DNA from an actual specimen, which is not easy. Ebert will scour local fish markets for new specimens, but one of the best-and only-ways is to use a trawling boat to scrape the depths. (The fish is usually dead by the time it makes it back up to the surface.)

Even without a physical specimen, the video has provided a wealth of information. First, unlike many creatures of the deep, pointy nosed blue chimaera seemed to be a ham for the ROV's camera and its bright lights. ( See more pictures of odd deep-sea animals.)

"It's almost a little comical," says Ebert. "It would come up and bounce its nose off the lens and swim around and come back."

In addition, rocky outcrops in the background of the video suggest that pointy-nosed blue chimaeras prefer this habitat to the flat, soft-bottom terrain that's usually the domain of other ghost shark species, says Ebert, a specialist in what he calls lost sharks, or species that don't tend to garner the attention of great white sharks and hammerheads.

Unlike those more well-known sharks, chimaeras don't have rows of ragged teeth, but instead munch up their prey-mollusks, worms, and other bottom-dwellers-with mineralized tooth plates.

A pattern of open channels on their heads and faces, called lateral line canals, contain sensory cells that sense movement in the water and help the ghost sharks locate lunch.

And perhaps most fascinating, male chimaeras sport retractable sex organs on their foreheads. (Also see " Two-Headed Sharks Keep Popping Up-No One Knows Why.")

"Water Bunnies"

At least three other species of chimaera likely live across the world's oceans, so it's not that surprising that the pointy-nosed blue would as well, says Dominique Didier, a marine biologist and chimaera expert at Millersville University in Pennsylvania.

"The only way we can collect these species is by trawling," she says. "So, it's like a snapshot. Imagine trying to understand species distribution in Lake Michigan and you sample the lake using a Dixie cup. Trawling the ocean is like that."

"I suspect many species are wide-ranging-we just don't have the data."

Whether you call them chimaeras, ghost sharks, ratfish, or even "water bunnies"-which is what Hydrolagus roughly means in Greek-the fish "are just one of the many beautiful and poorly studied species that shares this planet with us," Didier says.
Follow Jason Bittel on Twitter and Facebook.

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Deep-Sea Ghost Shark Filmed Alive In Ocean For First Time

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Dive deep deep down into the ocean, long past the point where the sun's rays can penetrate, and you will enter the realm of the ghost sharks. Also called chimaeras, ghost sharks are dead-eyed, wing-finned fish rarely seen by people. Relatives of sharks and rays, these deep-sea denizens split off from these other groups some 300 million years ago.

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Discover the incredible anglerfish, denizen of the ocean's deep, lightless realms. Learn how these predators attract their victims with bits of luminous flesh.

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200 species
Less than one foot to 3.3 feet long
Only females have the front lure
Able to swallow prey twice their size
Males latch on and merge into females
Female are larger than males

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Aphotic-The region of a lake or sea where no light reaches.
The aphotic zone contains no algae or phytoplankton, and its inhabitants are exclusively carnivorous animals or organisms that feed on sediment , all reliant on energy inputs from the euphotic zone.

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