There’s a peculiar deep-sea forest without any trees that’s full of ornament-like sponges all facing in the same direction. It looks so strange that scientists have been given it the nickname the ‘Forest of the Weird’.
The uncanny underwater forest was discovered in 2017 when deep-sea researchers were exploring an underwater mountain in the waters around Johnston Atoll (in the Pacific Ocean) with a deep-sea robot.
In footage from the discovery, the camera swoops over a dark seabed around 2,442 metres deep. It is peppered with pale sponges sprouting out of the ocean floor like a cluster of delicately placed ornaments.
“Jeez, talk about a Dr Seuss-like landscape,” says one researcher in the video. “This is attack of the sponges here,” jokes one of the scientists.
“Remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer encountered [a] deep-sea alien-like community composed almost exclusively of glass sponges that were uniformly oriented with the direction of the current,” says NOAA Ocean Exploration on its website.
Glass sponges typically feed by filtering bacteria, plankton and other tiny particles from the water. And the sponges they found on this section of seabed all knew where their best chance of a meal was coming from – their large rounded ‘faces’ all pointed expectantly in one direction like a crowd of cartoon aliens at a concert.
“The great thing about this that I love is the way they’re all oriented directly into the current,” says one of the experts. Directing themselves straight towards the main current gives these filter-feeders the best chance of capturing any snacks that drift their way.
“Every time we do these dives all I can think about is this is the type of experience someone would have if they found life on another planet,” says one of the researchers in the video. “Everything’s so alien.”
Despite being so far from everyday human life, one of the extraterrestrial-looking sponges has a familiar appearance. Its thin stalk and rounded body with two rounded holes might remind some people of a pig’s snout on a stick, but these researchers though it resembled something else. “They’re oddly reminiscent of the large eyes of the alien from the beloved movie, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” says NOAA Fisheries on its website.
The same sponge had been collected from a seamount near the Mariana Trench in 2016. Scientists called it Advhena magnifica, nicknamed the E.T. sponge. “Advhena is from the Latin advena, which means alien, but in the sense of visitor, foreigner, or immigrant,” explains Cristiana Castello Branco, who discovered the sponge, on NOAA’s website. “Of course, we humans were the actual visitors to the sponge’s deep-sea home when we found this ‘magnificent alien’.”
A passing comment from one of the scientists while he was taking in the extraordinary scene lent the strange location its name.
“These things just stun me,” Chris Mah from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History can be heard saying in the footage, “like a forest of the weird.”
Top image credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration