Question: Is It Allowed For you to get a certain species from the ocean and safely bring it back to earth to see how other creatures behave

Diva Amon answered on 28 Jun 2012:

Hi reeceherbert,

We are allowed to bring animals up from the deep-sea in most places. There are only a few countries that are very strict. No matter what country we are going to though, we need to get permits to take the animals out of the seas around that country and then a different set of permits to bring them into the UK. Luckily, most of the deep sea is international waters, that means that no country owns most of it. This means that we are free to bring up animals and only need to get permits to bring them into the UK.

Sadly, because most of these animals we bring up are from the deep-sea – the conditions which they live under are really really different to those at the sea surface where the boat is. There are much higher pressures, colder temperatures and no light in the deep sea. Most deep-sea animals have really special bodies that are adapted or accustomed to living in the deep sea. Its like if you tried to put a dolphin down in the deep sea, it would die immediately as it doesn’t have a body made to live down there. This means that by the time we bring back the deep-sea animals to the surface most have died or are dying as they just cant cope. We can still study them though, as we can get video footage using special robots called Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) so we can see their behaviour. We can also learn a lot from the dead deep-sea animals, like about how they reproduce, feed, breathe, their DNA and what they look like in detail! Because the deep-sea animals are so new and we know so little about them, we try not to take too many as they could turn out to be really rare.