Alien Lifeforms of the Deep Ocean

People often talk about the alien beauty of the deep ocean. I have no idea what these people are smoking: all I see is lightless terror filled with horrible monsters. Still, I marvel at it either way.

Perhaps the most wonderful quote in this New York Times review of The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian is this:

Interspersed among 220 color photographs are essays by some of the world’s top experts on deep-sea life that reflect on what lies beneath. For example, Laurence Madin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution notes the violence that air and gravity do to creatures without internal or external skeletons when they are pulled up to the deck of a ship, obliterating their varieties of form and function.

“This unattractive jello-like mass,” he writes, “is the unfair land version of amazing and delicate creatures that can display their true beauty only in their natural watery environment.”

Which at least saves us the worry of them suddenly wriggling up the drain while we're taking a bath.

Mysteries to Behold in the Dark Down Deep: Seadevils and Species Unknown [New York Times]