Unexplainable - A trip to the twilight reefs

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Down beneath the waves, where the light starts to fade, there's an ecosystem scientists don't fully understand. About a decade ago, some researchers left structures in this mysterious world and let them grow encrusted with life. Now they're pulling them back up again and unwrapping them like scientific presents.Guests: Luiz Rocha, ichthyology curator at the California Academy of Sciences, along with Johanna Loacker, Lynn Bonomo, Chris Meyer, Sarah Tweedt, Tito Monteiro da Cruz Lotufo, Emily Rutkowski, Yara Tibirica, Daniel Eisenhauer, Terry Gosliner, and Chrissy PiotrowskiFor show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odu for free at Odu.com. That's ODOO.com. On a break, beautiful day, last May. I was standing on a boat floating in the waters of the Republic of Palau.

I was watching several people preparing to scuba dive. Beneath our boat, there was a gorgeous coral reef ecosystem, a turquoise world that was teeming with life. But these divers were planning to go beyond those shallow reefs. Go deeper. Recreational scuba divers are often going 18 meters down, max, maybe 30 or 40 if they have extra certification.

But two of these divers were planning to go down to 45 meters. And the other two were going to go even further. about 100 meters into the deep. Are all divers mentally in physically prepared to the sky? Absolutely. And they were doing all this, preparing to descend so far, because they wanted to retrieve some scientific structures they'd left down there,

down in a mysterious, understudied world known as the mesophotic coral ecosystems, which is a mouthful, so I will call them debriefs, for short. But there are a world that one of the diversers, zoologists named Luis Rocha, has a lot of questions about. And the hope is that these structures will help him and others get some answers, help them put together some of the pieces of a very puzzling ecosystem, but they fundamentally do not understand.

But the gangs begin. So, this is unexplainable. I'm Brad Pinkerton. And today on the show, how do you solve a puzzle like the deep reefs? Luis Rocha started exploring the ocean early. So I grew up in a small town in coastal Brazil. Oh, it was small when I was growing up, not so small now, but always going to the beach every weekend.

And I always had this interest and attraction to the ocean. So I always wanted to go deep. I always wanted to go to a place where people don't go to very often or never been to before. I wanted to see things that nobody has seen before. So I started with tide pools and then snorkeling and then scuba. diving and then school would diving a little deeper and then deeper and deeper and pushing the limit of depth. And I always very excited about discovering new things. So it makes sense that Luis, as part of his work for the California Academy of Sciences, explores these mysterious deep reefs.

But what is a debrief exactly? The term can be used to describe ecosystems that go way down into like the ocean's abyss, so places with no sunlight at all, sometimes thousands of meters down. But for the purposes of this story, we're going to use Deep Reef to refer to a world that's a little closer to home. So a few tens of meters from the surface down to about 150 meters. And to understand that world a little better, let's pretend we're Luis for a minute and do some of our own exploring. First, we will go somewhere with deep reefs, let's say Palau for now, And then we'll dive. And for the first 10, 20, 30 meters of our descent,

we'll be in bright, clear waters, and we'll see the kinds of coral reef you might be more familiar with. These are complex ecosystems full of crackling crustaceans and stinging anemones and darting, flashing, munching fish. And at their heart, they have hard corals. So these little animals that secrete the calcium-carbonate structures that make up the reef itself. But these corals partner up with photosynthesizing algae

that need sunlight to thrive. And as we go deeper, down to 40 meters, 50, 70, 100, the temperature will start to drop, and the sunlight will start to fade. Actually fade so much that people sometimes use the term twilight reef to describe this ecosystem. And that dimming light means that there is less and less opportunity for photosynthesis at these depths.

But it does not mean that there is no life down here. Instead, we're descending into a world of animals that can survive with less light, sponges and sea squirts, mollusks and crustaceans, riah zoans, even corals that have adaptations that let them make the most of low light. And the deeper portion of reefs is really, really the unknown portion. So almost everything we know about coral reef biology, about coral reef ecology, about coral reef ecology, about coral reef evolution comes from science done in the top 30 meters of reef. Anything between 30 meters and 150 meters is really, really unknown because it requires a

different kind of diving. It requires technical diving. It requires much bigger time commitment from the scientist, and it's riskier. Even from the human perspective, it's risky for the divers. People have used remote-operated vehicles and submersibles to explore the deep reef. But those can be expensive. And if you drop a camera down there, it might not be able to capture the really small species

or the hidden ones. And so deep reefs are just trickier to study than their shallow neighbors are. And there's lots left to learn. Whenever we go somewhere, the first thing we find is new species. I'm talking about fish here, which is one of the most charismatic organisms

you can find in a reef. But if we started looking at sponges, and gargonians and crustaceans and mollusks. I mean, there's so many species. It's like the most basic thing in science you can do is describe a species, and it's the first step that kind of starts the chain to do everything else. But even at that level, those ecosystems are unknown. If you imagine the project to understand shallow coral reefs,

so the coral reefs that we know more about, like a whole bunch of people all collaborating to try. and solve a 10 million-piece puzzle. That puzzle, obviously, still has a lot of gaps. We have lots of questions about coral reefs. But humans have been collecting pieces of that puzzle and snapping them together for a very long time now. We probably have like 8 to 9 million pieces,

and of those, I'd say, 5 million are assembled. So if you squint at the shallow coral reef puzzle, you can always get a pretty good picture of what's there, right? who's eating whom and how species interact and what gaps you might want to focus on next. If you try to compare that to the deep reef puzzle, though, Luis told me the puzzle itself might actually be a bit smaller, just because less light can mean less diversity. But he can only guess at how many pieces this puzzle has right now,

and we've pulled up fewer of those pieces to look at. So it's a lot less information to go with. So there's so many big questions that need to. be answered. Luis wonders about things like, what's the main energy source for everything down there in this dimmer light, right? What does the food chain look like? Or how do things evolve to live down at these depths? And then how similar are they to the shallow ecosystems or how different? How are they affected by climate change? These are some of the big, basic questions you might ask,

but also... In some ways, we don't even know what questions to ask. When we go to ecology and evolution, we could ask the same questions as we do for the shallow reefs, but that's kind of not the same. We really only know what questions to ask after we have a baseline understanding of what the ecosystem is. And for deep reefs, we don't know that yet.

So for years now, Luis has been gathering bits of basic information on these reefs, been diving down, exploring at these depths, collecting fish, which are a specialty. But the problem with diving is that even with specialized equipment, it has limits. As you go down, gas gets pushed into your tissues,

kind of slowly turning you into the human equivalent of a carbonated soda. And the deeper you go, the more pressure there is, so the faster you get carbonated, or nitrogenated, really. So if you want to descend to 100 meters to explore the deep reefs, you get gas.

very fast. We have a very, very short time, and by short time, I mean five minutes, six, seven minutes. What can you do in five minutes? Usually, because it's so limited and we have so much gear, each diver has one task. So if my task is taking pictures, I come down with my camera and I take as many pictures as I can. If my task is doing transects, I do two transects and we start moving up. If my task is collecting fish, I collect two or three fish, and we start moving up. That moving up can then take hours, because he has to let the gas in his tissues out, sort of bit by bit.

Kind of like you'd slowly turn the cap on a shaken up soda bottle to keep everything from exploding out too fast. Sometimes he's able to do more science on the way up, but other times he has had to try and entertain himself with like an iPad in underwater housing. I tried playing angry birds in it. It made me very angry because I could never get the touch screen is not very precise. I could never get the ball to go the right way. But it was a good pastime. It is obviously not super efficient to try and explore something in five-minute bursts. And about a decade ago, Luis started to explore another option, too.

There was a method of sampling a lot of biodiversity on the, reef that was pioneered in the early 2000. And it's called Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures. ARMS, or Arms, for short. It's PVC structures consisting of PVC plates that are stacked together, and the plates have a standard size. They're stacked together the same way. So you can build each structure, each one of these structures,

is identical to the other. Arms were developed, basically, to study underwater ecosystems in a standardized way. So if you pick up an encrusted rock from a reef, it'll be different from other encrusted rocks on other reefs. It'll be unique. Arms are built to be not unique. Very similar and very comparable. So you take what looks like a little nine-floor hotel, the size of a toaster oven, these sort of stacks of gray PVC plates, and you bring however many of them you want, three, 13, 34, whatever. down to various spots that you want to study or compare.

Then you secure them in place and you leave them for a while. As soon as you drop any kind of clean structure on a reef, it starts getting colonized by larvae of everything around it, sponges, gorgonians, corals. And then because there's a lot of hiding spots between the plates, so between the floors of the hotel, they start getting colonized by shrimp, by mollusks, by assidians, by anything you can imagine in the ocean.

And it becomes this stable, diverse, like, mini-reef, if you will, packed with a lot of biodiversity that would be very hard to collect all at once in any given reef. Years later, you come back, you scoop the arms up, and then you can study this mini reef that you've made. You can see and touch and smell things, sample them, sample them, photograph them, send everything in for DNA analysis, whatever you want. So Luis, this seemed like a solution to some of his frustrations, a way to really get a long look at these deep reefs instead of the briefs he was getting from diving.

And so between 2016 and 2018, he went out to four different locations, Palau, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and French Polynesia, and in each place, he, along with a group of of other researchers, dove down to put a bunch of arms at 10, 50, and 100 meters. And then they waited. They actually waited a little longer than Louise would have liked because he needed funding and COVID messed up some plans. So almost a decade passed. But eventually, at long last, some private funders agreed to underwrite the retrieval

of the arms that he'd left. Which takes us right back to where we started. When Luis and his fellow divers had just jumped into the water to retrieve some arms. What they found after the break. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu.

It's the only business. software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-O-4-3 at O-D-O-D-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operating operations fall out of sync. Everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify

campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system

and it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. Over the course of several days, I watched a whole team of people pull arms out of the deep reefs of Palau.

So a boat full of divers, including Luis, would go down into the deep and actually get the arms. But then because the deep divers had to stay at depth a long time and decompress, they would pass the arms up kind of relay style to shallower divers, who then brought them up to a second boat, full of scientists from lots of different institutions. They're a boat length away.

The shallower divers would emerge, and they would pass a small, clear tub to the people waiting on the boat. You got it? Yes. All right. And inside that time. The tub was an arms, sort of cube-like stack, crusted over with red and orange light. Looks like a goody.

Some arms were a little sparser. Others were almost fuzzy with organisms. Lots of sponges on this one. But each one was quickly transferred from the small tub into a big black storage bin full of sea water. And then once all the arms were ready to go, usually around two of them each day. we'd take off back to the lab. Because they wanted to start documenting everything while it was as fresh as possible.

We would motor back through aqua-marine waters, past little islands covered in green forests. And eventually we would pull into the Palau International Coral Reef Center, or Pickrick, which is an institution devoted to coral research that was letting these scientists use their facilities for this work. And you might imagine that the main... focus here would be new species, right? Unknown things. Instead, I watched the researchers racing to just document everything they found, new or old, in as much detail as possible. It's like a well-oiled,

cheese-it-fueled, sort of beautiful disassembly line. Do you have another size wrench? Step one was just breaking down the arms. Two researchers from Cal Academy named Johanna and Lynn were often helping with this part. And they would pull on bright red elbow-length rubber gloves. It kind of looked like the gloves they use for insemination of cows. And then they would open up a bin and use a wrench to pull the stacks of nine gray arms plates apart. Which one? Okay.

I'm on. Sort of one thick square plate at a time. I think I got it. Hold on. Okay. Each plate, as they lifted it out, was almost like a modernist painting. So picture like a little gray square canvas, but covered in splotches and streaks and swirls of red and orange and yellow and green.

And they would place each of these works of art into a little wire rack in a new tub of seawater. And then when all nine plates were in, they would pick the tub up and haul it over to a cool air-conditioned lab nearby before then returning to the bin that they had disassembled the arms in. Now, back to the sounds of slushing hook. They would sieve through the water in the bin, and then they would hunt through those sieve sediments for anything moving. Lynn told me it was kind of like a game of I-spy. So imagine that, but with sea slugs and worms and lots of crustaceans.

Crab some shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. Shramp. And then meanwhile, some of the other members of the team had set up stations to process what they call the furniture of the plate. So everything that was not moving that these various creatures had been crawling around on.

And they began with the big picture, literally. So we're going to start plate photographing. Chris, a Smithsonian curator who directs the Global Arms Program, was the guy in charge of this big picture photography. Oh, you know what?

This is kind of an important part. This piece here needs to be plugged into the computer. Okay. I forget to do that. Not much happens. Once he had things, properly set up. He would take a series of high-resolution pictures of each plate, and then those were all stitched together into sort of one beautiful, complete image.

So this is the photo was a fun part. It's kind of like nature's art. When Chris was done, photographing about the front and the back of the plate, it would move on to a trio of samplers, we were sort of the next step in the arms disassembly line. So what we're doing is we're looking for every unique thing, which we call morpho species. And we're trying to get some representative tissue samples from all of these things so that we can sequence the DNA and match the DNA to the organism. Sarah is also from the Smithsonian. And she was in charge of grabbing and photographing samples of soft corals and other kind of encrusting creatures on each plate. You know, this red one here is distinct from this one.

These may be the same species. This one, let's see. Next to her was Tito from the University of Sao Paulo. And he was doing basically the same thing Sarah was doing, but for these animals called tunicates, so things like sea squirts, which, he told me, are actually our closest invertebrate relatives. This just decided to take a different route on evolution

and become simpler rather than complex. So they can solve all their problems very, very easily. Across the table from both of them, Emily from the University of Hawaii, was sampling sponges. Guys, this sponge is so cool. It's kind of poking and prodding them, cutting them up. Sometimes when you cut them, they'll have, like, there's this one that has, like, a strong garlic smell when you cut it. So you've got to make sure to smell them as well.

Yes. You got to ask them what they do on the weekends, you know, it matters. It matters. Emily also spent a lot of time just showing me sponges, so she showed me a sponge that sparkled with little silver filaments, and then this thin, flat sponge

that felt dry underwater, a little sponge like a sand castle, all part of her campaign to convince people that sponges are cooler than we give them credit for. You know, I do, I convert one person, and then they convert one person, it's like a triangle, you know?

A pyramid scheme. Mostly, though, all three of these researchers were just in an ongoing conversation with each other as they tried to identify the obscure, colorful lumps on these plates. Well, you already did, right? Yeah, it's on the edge. It's a spoon. No. When I first got to the lab, every time someone started to ask what something was,

kind of expected them to say, I've never seen this before. It's a new species. But before these researchers could even begin to wonder about something like that, they had to answer much more fundamental questions. It's firm? Yeah, it's not a sponge. Like if something was a sponge or a tunicette or what? It may be a tunicade, but it's really small.

I couldn't see the siphons. So that's why I wouldn't call tunicate. Yeah. And while all this was happening, the people playing I spy would be trying to identify the animals they were finding. They would carry creatures in cups over to a researcher sitting in the corner by a microscope. Earlier on, this was Yara, later Daniel, both from the University of Guam. The family is Pagirup-Sue today, which literally means fake hermit grub.

And then people would also bring creatures out to another room, where these two zoologists from Cal Academy, Chrissy and Terry, were sitting next to a whole bank of microscopes. ready to identify things. Oh, it looks like it's another one of these scally bragmatidae, the maggot worm. Really, though, everyone in the lab was contributing to this sort of overall project of trying to figure out what was what.

It was this constant chorus. Wow, he's cool. What is that? Like, who builds that? Oh, that's an ostracod. I think it's an amphipod. Did you write down 1570 is a Capriolidae? Oh, it's not a business. It's not a decapod.

I think it's a polinoid. I think this is the hard text. This one's labralineata. Sometimes they could identify things with specificity. Oscarella. Oscarella, for sure. Other times, they were documenting things they were maybe less familiar with. So at the end of this particular project, they had close to 3,000 specimens.

And they're still processing the data, so the estimates are changing. But at last check-in, around 3% had species name tags. A little less than 20% were a step up from that. So they had a genus, but not a species. And then many, many others were more broadly identified by family or subfamily or at higher taxonomic levels. Take a look.

And that's why they were trying to grab samples of everything and document those samples so well. So that down the line, people with more time and more access to genetic tools might be able to pin down exactly what these things are. Did you guys get this brachypod looking this green sponge up here? See the brack right in the middle? No, I don't have that at all. You grab it? Okay, let me get a tweezers.

I haven't seen that one. There was one guy. This guy named Terry, who's a new to Brank expert, so he studies a type of sea slug. And he really could look at certain sea slugs and basically make the on-the-spot call about whether he thought they were, at least likely, to be new species to science, pending genetic confirmation.

And on the first day that I was following the team, they actually found several species that he thought were new. It's your lucky day. What have you got? A third new to rank. Johanna found it. How exciting. At one point, Johanna found a little sea slug. It looked sort of like a small yellowish oval with little horns

and a branching, vainy pattern. Lynn carried that slug over to Terry, and he was pretty quickly able to guess what family was in. Look at it. Look at it. I think it's a discodorid of some sort. Okay. But he waited a bit for the slug's gills to open up,

and then he pulled out this document on his computer. It's a book he's been revising that's full of pictures of Mutabranks. He basically just started scrolling through, like an incredible number of multicolored slugs. This very loud machine started running in the background as Terry was scrolling. But eventually he landed on one slag in particular. Okay. So it's similar to that.

And it has that sort of network like pattern. But it's distinct. So my conclusion is that until we have some genetic evidence that it's a third new species, most likely. Terry told me he felt fantastic about this, and he seemed quite pleased. But he wasn't like, everyone stop what you're doing,

you know, come see the new species. And earlier that same day, when I was talking to him about a different sea slug that he also believed to be a new species, I even said to him, you seem very blasé about a new species. I'm not Blase. I'm excited.

It's just, you know, another day's work, but I still... So, do you want this here? What? This is for you, here. What is that? Limpit, I believe, that Chris just not over. Do you want it here? To be fair, these arms took a long time to unpack,

and work often stretched late into the night. So nobody really had too much time to dwell on anything. But also, over the days, kind of struck me that many people in the team were definitely excited about the idea of seeing something new. But they seemed just as excited about relationships between species, whether or not they were named. Oh, Tito, is this our Medusa guy? Chris and Tito, for example, were interested in a tunicot they found that was full of snake-like worms. and then when I walked into the lab one day, several people told me to go look at something known as a pom-pom crab,

which turned out to be a tiny yellow crab holding purple anemones in its claws. Sarah, meanwhile, seemed especially excited about creatures that mimic other creatures. So one night at 112 a.m., she showed me what she called the frosting on the cake of the day. So these are ovulets. These were bright red sea snails. But Sarah was so jazzed about them because she also had the bright red octocorals that they lived on and sort of looked a lot like.

And the mimicry is so precise that that isn't a polypid on a coral. It's a papillia on the snail. This is a polyp on a coral. That's the coral. In another conversation with Sarah, she said something that's kind of the key to all of this for me.

So the researchers had just gone through some final steps in processing the arms. They had scraped the plates clean with a paint scraper, ground everything up in a blender, before pouring it into a very fine mesh bag. And Sarah was in the process of doing something that some people called milking the turd, which was removing the water, so that the remaining material could be sampled and sent off to be analyzed for DNA. And while she did this, I was talking to her about my puzzle piece idea.

So this idea that we have very few pieces from the deep reefs, and this was a project to bring up more. And she said to me, Oh, yeah. So to be fair, you know, we have had collections in museums, for instance, from exploring expeditions. And people would dredge and pull up weird, you know, miso-to-deep things. They would grab individual puzzle pieces from the deep twilight reefs,

but those pieces weren't really in context necessarily. The beauty of something like the Arms Project isn't just pulling up pieces. It's more like that thing where you open a puzzle box and some of the pieces are still stuck together. So if you lift them out gently, you get not just a few pieces, but how they connect. Something really powerful is taking note of associations. Like, who likes to live with who?

You know, what likes to live on what? What gets along? What doesn't seem to get along? You know, I think that's particularly exciting to document because it's not always easy to keep organisms together where they live when you're collecting them. And I think that arms allows you to do that in a really nice way. Which is why you were so excited at 2 a.m.

That was so excited at 2 a.m. That idea about individual puzzle pieces versus the connections between them feels connected to a conversation I had with Louise. So I was talking to him about the idea that debriefs are a really hard puzzle. And I asked him why he would even want to work on a puzzle that was so hard and had so many gaps. It's the reward at the end of it. If it's a hard puzzle, and at the end of it, the reward is always bigger. But you're not, like, in our lifetimes, will we assemble the deep-brief puzzle?

No, no. We will not assemble the puzzle, no. But we'll generate some good pieces for the next generation to assemble. So you might not even get the reward of the really hard puzzle. No, no. At the time, it felt like a little bit of a little bit of a real hard puzzle. contradiction in his thinking, honestly. But listening back to my conversation with Sarah and with other researchers, I realized I was thinking about Louise a little like an individual puzzle piece

and not as a piece connected to other pieces. My name is Johanna Loecker. Obviously, I am aware that science is a process that involves a large number of people all working together. I'm Lin-Binomo. But there's still this impulse to focus on one individual. and their contributions to a project. I'm Emily Rutkowski.

So I expected for this story to focus mostly on Louise. Maybe one other researcher in the lab. I'm Sarah Tweed. But when I arrived, I quickly realized that if I focused on any one person, I'd kind of lose the plot of how the arms were brought up and disassembled. I'm Chrissy Piotrowski. My name is Terry Gosler. My name is Matt Schmidt.

I'm Lauren Scheinberg. And the project of processing these arms won't end with this group. So my name is Louise Rocha. From here in Palau, some of the samples collected will go back to the California Academy of Sciences. Others will go to the Smithsonian. It's Chris Meyer. The University of Sao Paulo and elsewhere. My name is Tito Montaero-de-Cruz-Lut-Fol.

Short version, Tito-Lotufo. Last year, they brought up the arms that they left in Guam. I'm Daniel Eisenhower. And the University of Guam kept many of those samples in their collections. And these samples will be able to be in the same. And these samples will be available for people to study. So other scientists will pick through the organisms that the team have collected here. They'll identify things more precisely.

They'll work out what's new and what's not new, but also how things connect. So I'm Susanna Bear. I'm a post-structural fellow with the California Academy of Sciences. Susanna, also known as Susie, was one of the divers, and she works with Luis. She's already analyzed some of the Guam samples to understand how much the species change as you go deeper. The Palau samples will let her sort of check that work and see if her findings hold up here too. And there is plenty more work to be done on that question

and on all the other big questions that people have. So, sure, yes, Luis is not going to solve the very hard puzzle of these deep twilight reefs all alone. And it almost certainly will not be solved in our lifetimes. But to me at least, there is, something kind of rewarding and exciting about the idea that there's so much work left to be done and that it will take so many people working together to do it. What's this sponge?

Oh, this is scary to me. Yeah, start it. I'm playing the new to bring songs. You're new to break songs. What's this one? What's a nudibank song? Sorry, Yarra has pulled up a video that's called Psychedelic Seaslog Dance on YouTube. on YouTube.

Wait until you listen to new tune. You don't need to see. You can't just listen. The newtie branch started way long ago, in the ocean deep below. It was the latest crazen town. It was the greatest dance around. The newie branch, branch, the psychedelics east of dance dance

to the new de, new de, newie, it's the latest. It's the greatest. This episode was produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by the wonderful Lissa Soap and by Jorge Just. Thanks Jorge and Lissa for everything. Joanna Solitaroff and Meredith Hadnott both also weighed in on aspects of this episode. Meredith runs the show and Joanna is executive director.

Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Melissa Hirsch, checked the facts. Noam Hassanfeld. does our music. And the new to Brank song you're hearing is the psychedelic sea slug dance

by Will Thompson. Miles You Will, Chris Shortleff, and Davon Howard helped me with gear, Valerie Schenckman, Alex Coles, Kareem,

and Sally Helm are the fact that some corals can fluoresce. Thanks always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me at Noam.

Thank you to Megan Ely at Cal Academy. for all the work that she put into coordinating my visit. Thank you to Clara Diaz for taking the time to help me understand the mesophotic. And thanks to Shannon Bennett for her time as well. And big thanks to every single one of the people who were working on this Palau project who walked me through what they were up to. But and especially big thanks to Johanna Loecker for taking so much time

both before my trip and during my trip to explain things to me. If you, our listeners, have thoughts about deep reefs or deep reefs, about the mesophotic or your own stories about exploring the ocean, please reach out. We are at Unexplanable at Vox.com. We'd also love to hear your ideas for show topics. If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It's very easy to do.

Just go to Vox.com slash members, and you'll get access to all of Vox's journalism, but also know that you are supporting all of Vox's journalism. For those of you who have emailed us to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. And thanks also to those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform of choice, or just told someone in your life about the show. You are the best. Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not know. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if?

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