Informant38

A bizarre new species of jellyfish has been discovered in the deep waters off the Californian coast.
The bell-shaped creature spans a metre in diameter and has been nicknamed 'Big Red' because of its unusual deep red colour. The US and Japanese teams that discovered it say the species deserves its own subfamily.
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"Diving almost every day, we tend to take for granted some of the unusual and even bizarre animals that we see in the deep ocean," says George Matsumoto at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, who led the study. "This just shows that we need to keep our eyes open, because there`still plenty to discover down there."
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He adds that as scientists have missed a species of such a large size and range until now, there could be many more deep sea discoveries waiting to be found. Herdson agrees. "There's no economic incentive to go sampling at that depth," he told New Scientist. "Most of what we know about the sea comes from fishing." Fishing is generally carried out at much shallower waters, because deep-sea fish are waxy and unpalatable. But as fish stocks decline, people are fishing deeper, he says, which could lead to more new discoveries.

New Scientist 07 May 03