Re the colossal squid juvenile recently discovered in the Antarctic depths why aren’t we poking round down there looking for more stuff? Nuclear military subs run around down there all the time why aren’t we (or someone) getting a mini-sub down there to poke around? It is too complex or dangerous?
Just a WAG–it’s too expensive. Those puppies cost big money to run.
I don’t know about the new specimen, but this BBC story says the previous one was caught in a trawl net at a depth of 2,000 to 2,200 metres. Franky I didn’t know trawl nets could be used at such depths - that’s 4 times deeper than the maximum operating depth of a typical nuclear submarine. Some research submarines can reach those depths but they are specialized and expensive vehicles and need a lot of support equipment, including a mother ship.
The latest specimen was caught very near the surface.
As to the OP, well, I’d guess it’s because there’s just not a heck of a lot of money out there to fund deep ocean research. I saw some documentary a while back on an expedition to look for a giant squid, and they mentioned that many of the researchers almost have to do this in their spare time - they spend most of the time digging for grant money, and end up having to cash in vacation days to go on partially self-funded expeditions.
And while we may have military nuclear subs down there, but they’re not equipped with windows.
Doing anything in the antarctic is involved due to the harsh environmental conditions.
Well, as soon as crazy billionaires tire of circumnavigating the globe in various craft, perhaps they’ll look into it.
One other point to consider from watching a couple of Robert Ballard bio programs. There has been a lot of exploration and human contact on the ocean surface and in shallow water environments. There has been far less, but still important, research in deep-ocean or sefloor environments. There has been almost none in the mid-ocean. It’s generally assumed to be sparsely-populated, mostly by organisms just moving through vertically. But there is little to substandiate that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this assumption turned out to be spectacularly wrong. To expect only a few organisms to be taking advantage of such a huge space seems to me a strange attitude. Still, I can’t deny that there have been comparatively few encounters with creatures in the mid-ocean.
RR