Out of the Depths

About the last of the earth's living creatures not catalogued by man live in the deep sea. Last week man's deep-sea fishing techniques were catching up with some of them.

Off Southern California, Dr. Carl L. Hubbs of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was having good fishing with a new kind of deep-sea trawl. Its mouth is held open by a broad, V-shaped steel beam that acts like an airplane wing in reverse, making the net dive downward while giving it unusual stability. It can be towed at six knots, instead of the two knots which is top speed for ordinary trawls.

With his new, fast net, Dr. Hubbs catches faster fish, some of them as deep as 9,000 ft. "Every time we send the net down," says Hubbs, "we come up with something never before seen on this coast: fish with telescopic eyes, long fanglike teeth, dragonlike appearance." One fish caught has a long ratlike tail. Another, the black swallower, has an extensible stomach, convenient for heavy, infrequent meals. It can swallow a victim three times as big as itself. Another fish has a well-defined neck. Another has a huge lower jaw, a hundred times the size of the rest of its head, which it uses very much as Dr. Hubbs uses his trawl.

The present nets are at most 15 ft. wide, but Dr. Hubbs plans to build one 50 ft. wide, and catch even bigger and faster deep-sea inhabitants. Such creatures are known to exist; sperm whales, for instance, live mainly on giant squid taken at great depths. There is a chance that the new net may catch such a squid.

Off the Philippines, other scientific fishermen were combing even deeper waters. Dr. Anton F. Bruun of the Danish research ship Galathea reported that there seems to be no limit to the depths that life can sink. His men dredged the bottom of the Mindanao trench, the deepest part (35,400 ft.) of the ocean, never explored before. They hauled up 17 sea anemones, 61 sea cucumbers, two mollusks and one crustacean. All were comparatively fragile creatures, but they did not seem to mind living in darkness and cold more than six miles down, where the water pressure is more than seven tons a square inch.

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