ASSOCIATED PRESS
Big Red, or Tiburonia granrojo, a new species of monster jellyfish, is shown near the Farallon Islands, lit by a remotely operated submarine.
Ocean depths yield
new species of jellyfishThe creature is known as Big Red
and is found in isle waters
A new species of jellyfish with a yard-wide fleshy red bell and a cluster of thick arms with wartlike stingers has been found by scientists nearly a mile beneath the cold, dark waters off Hawaii and other parts of the Pacific Ocean.
The life of Big Red, as they call it, is still totally unknown. Scientists do not know what they eat, how they reproduce or even if the ones they've seen are males or females.
George Matsumoto and other marine biologists of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing published a report in the journal Marine Biology saying 23 Big Reds have been found off the Farallon Islands near San Francisco, as well as in the Sea of Cortez, in Monterey Bay, and off Hawaii and Japan.
Matsumoto, in an e-mail to the Star-Bulletin, said the first sightings of the Big Red in Hawaii were on March 27 and 28, 2001. The first sighting was at a depth of 2,653 feet about 50 miles north of Molokai, while the second sighting was at a depth of 3,267 feet a little more than 20 miles south of Oahu.
"For now," Matsumoto said, "the good news is that Big Red is unique and fascinating and exciting, while the bad news is that it takes so much more research work to classify it, to publish what we learn about it and eventually to understand all the things we don't know about it. But even that's fun, too."
The only member of the new tribe collected intact is a tiny 8 inches wide, and it is now being studied at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Matsumoto said.
But the team has been using a remote-controlled submarine to get video images of the big jellyfish swimming, and has even collected tissue samples of the bell and the thick arms of one specimen. From the samples, scientists have concluded that Big Red is a unique species in a unique genus in a unique subfamily within a larger family.
They named the new genus Tiburonia after the aquarium's research vessel Tiburon, and the species granrojo, Spanish for "big red."
Gerald Crow, Waikiki Aquarium biologist and acting curator, spoke to Matsumoto this morning about the new jellyfish and said he hopes to see a video of it when the Monterey Bay scientist comes here next week for a meeting.
Little is known about the new species but the jellyfish's bright red color may be come from red shrimp in the diet, Crow said.
He said "Big Red" apparently is quite widespread in the Pacific but they've only been found individually, not in large groups.
"It's really a neat thing to find things new to science," Crow said, pointing out "the deep sea has a lot of mysteries yet to be answered. We tend to think we know everything about our planet but we still have a lot to learn."
Star-Bulletin reporter Helen Altonn contributed to this report
