Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. There are plenty of annual recap lists circulating around this time of year, but few of them involve the amount of work put in by California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Over the past year, researchers guided remotely operated vehicles more than 3,000 feet down to survey the vast biodiversity within some of the oceans' deepest and darkest regions. The data and footage collected during these trips will help experts fill in the gaps towards understanding the planet's hardest-to-reach ecosystems. To celebrate the past 12 months of discoveries, MBARI released a video highlighting some of 2025's most stunning, strange, and mysterious creature sightings.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Rare, deep-sea encounter: California scientists observe'extraordinary' seven-arm octopus On November 6, 2025, MBARI Senior Scientist Steven Haddock and researchers in MBARI's Biodiversity and Biooptics Team observed a seven-arm octopus (Haliphron atlanticus) during an expedition in Monterey Bay with MBARI's remotely operated vehicle at a depth of approximately 700 meters. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . California scientists captured rare footage of a seven-arm octopus eating a jellyfish.

The use of AI (artificial intelligence) technologies is transforming industries from manufacturing to healthcare, retail, agriculture, transportation, and beyond. Precedence Research estimates the global market for AI will reach nearly $1.6 trillion by 2030, up from about $87 billion in 2021. A new AI and machine learning-powered project funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation) will leverage these powerful technologies to transform the way scientists analyze ocean imagery, adding yet one more way AI is changing the way humans interact with everything--from other humans to machines and even data from the depths of the sea. Every day, new information from Earth's oceans is being collected by research crews and ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) equipped with cameras, video cameras, and instruments that measure parameters from the ROV's surroundings, such as water temperature. This equipment allows research vehicles to collect massive amounts of imagery and other data about the ocean.

The ocean is experiencing unprecedented rapid change, and visually monitoring marine biota at the spatiotemporal scales needed for responsible stewardship is a formidable task. As baselines are sought by the research community, the volume and rate of this required data collection rapidly outpaces our abilities to process and analyze them. Recent advances in machine learning enables fast, sophisticated analysis of visual data, but have had limited success in the ocean due to lack of data standardization, insufficient formatting, and demand for large, labeled datasets. To address this need, we built FathomNet, an open-source image database that standardizes and aggregates expertly curated labeled data. FathomNet has been seeded with existing iconic and non-iconic imagery of marine animals, underwater equipment, debris, and other concepts, and allows for future contributions from distributed data sources. We demonstrate how FathomNet data can be used to train and deploy models on other institutional video to reduce annotation effort, and enable automated tracking of underwater concepts when integrated with robotic vehicles. As FathomNet continues to grow and incorporate more labeled data from the community, we can accelerate the processing of visual data to achieve a healthy and sustainable global ocean.

A strange sea creature that lives 1,000 feet below the surface encased in a giant bubble of mucus may be key to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These bubble-houses are discarded and replaced regularly as the animal grows in size and its filters become clogged with particles. Once discarded, they sink to the seafloor and encapsulate the carbon for good, preventing it from re-entering the atmosphere. Larvaceans also capture and dispose of microplastics in this way, which can come from clothing and cosmetics and often ingested by other marine species. Researchers used a system of lasers mounted on a 12,000 pound robot to map the giant larvacean's delicate body in a series of 3D images.

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