{"id":720768,"date":"2026-07-31T10:57:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T10:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/720768\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T10:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T10:57:08","slug":"submersible-stumbles-upon-prehistoric-animal-365m-deep-in-pacific-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/720768\/","title":{"rendered":"Submersible stumbles upon prehistoric animal 365m deep in Pacific darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ocean researchers have shared the extraordinary moment a\u00a0nautilus\u00a0swam right up to their underwater vehicle to say hello.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Marine scientists were exploring\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/fieldnotes.nationalgeographic.org\/expedition\/pristineseasfijiexpedition2025\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Rotuma<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 an island around 300 miles north of Fiji \u2013 on a deep-sea submersible when something stood out to them on the seafloor around 365 metres deep. It was the iconic striped shell of a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoverwildlife.com\/animal-facts\/marine-animals\/remote-underwater-cameras-vanuatu\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">nautilus<\/a> \u2013 a prehistoric mollusc that has been on the planet since before the time of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoverwildlife.com\/dinosaurs\/if-dinosaurs-had-not-gone-extinct\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">dinosaurs<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs we approached, it seemed like the shelled creature was just as curious about us as we were about it, because it lifted up from the seafloor and started swimming its way over to us,\u201d says\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.org\/explore\/programs\/pristine-seas\/team-whitney-goodell\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Whitney Goodell<\/a>, a marine ecologist at National Geographic Pristine Seas.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt came right up to the glass dome and hovered around at our eye-level, as we excitedly pointed at it from inside our dry \u2018fishbowl\u2019 of a vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>The bizarre creature was out of shot of the submersible\u2019s cameras so the team grabbed their phones to try to capture the incredible sighting on film.<\/p>\n<p>A sighting like this is not common. \u201cWe occasionally see them on baited camera video,\u201d she says, \u201cbut encountering one by pure chance in their natural habitat is an absolute treat.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nautiluses live in the ocean\u2019s twilight zone, several hundred metres below the surface. \u201cThey spend most of their time in a \u2018Goldilocks\u2019 depth zone,\u201d Goodell explains. \u201cToo shallow and the water is dangerously warm, but too deep and extreme pressure will implode the gas-filled shell chambers they rely on for buoyancy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Because nautiluses rely so heavily on subsea features like the underwater bank the team was exploring, deep-sea conservation is important, she adds: \u201cProtecting these features safeguards the movement and survival of nautiluses and countless other deep-sea species.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More amazing wildlife videos from around the world<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ocean researchers have shared the extraordinary moment a\u00a0nautilus\u00a0swam right up to their underwater vehicle to say hello.\u00a0 Marine&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":720769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-720768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/720769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}