Bass Canyon is a huge underwater canyon in the Tasman Sea off the coast of Victoria, Australia. It’s around 50 miles long – the same as the Panama Canal – 6 miles wide and thousands of metres deep.
The seabed in this enormous submarine trench is made up of mud and sand mixed with fragments of shells and animal remains that have broken down over thousands of years. According to a Marine Geology study, “the modern Bass Canyon is one of the world's largest submarine canyon systems that is entirely located within a cool-water carbonate environment.”
In 1998, scientists collected samples from the canyon, which contained 12,000 small, single-celled organisms called foraminifera.
The researchers identified 220 species of foraminifera from both the seabed and the water column. Some of the specimens were alive, other individuals had died recently and some samples had been dead for thousands of years.
These little protozoans use minerals from the seawater to build tiny, protective shells around themselves.
“Although they don’t have brains, foraminifera are really smart in the way they build their shells,” says Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Joan Bernhard in an article about these tiny organisms. “Nearly every time I examine the cell structure of a different species, I discover some new adaptation that has allowed them to survive in a ‘hostile’ habitat.”
In 2025, marine scientists from CSIRO set out to find out more about what’s living in the canyon’s waters.
As part of their studies, they put a deep-tow camera down to 3,000 metres. These special camera systems “an withstand the harsh deep-sea environment whilst maintaining stability to return spectacular imagery providing scientists with a unique view of deep sea biodiversity,” they explain on their website.
At 3,000 metres, you’re firmly in the ocean’s midnight (bathypelagic) zone. Between 1,000 and 4,000 metres deep, this “is the single largest habitat on the planet, holding roughly 70 percent of all seawater, yet its animals and microbes remain among the least understood on Earth,” according to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Here, there’s no sunlight at all and, so, no photosynthesis. However, there are some twinkles of bioluminescence in the blackness – many animals use it to communicate with mates, attract prey or avoid predators.
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It’s also exceptionally cold – around 4°C – and under enormous pressure (between 100 to 400 atmospheres). Yet, life finds a way to prevail even here.
It may not be surprising that lots of the creatures the CSIRO scientists found here were strange and “squishy” – they’ve had to adapt to thrive in this harsh ecosystem.
"I think the deep-sea creatures, they're always a little bit freakier than their shallow water counterparts," scientist Georgia Nester told ABC News in an interview about the expedition. “The deep sea has a bit of a bad reputation in the sense that everyone thinks it's a little bit frightening, but many [animals there] are scavengers.”
One of the weirdos they photographed was a tripod fish. These strange animals have exceptionally long fins, which they use like stilts to perch above the ocean floor while waiting for a snack to float by. It makes them look eerily like the invading spaceships from War of the Worlds.
Other deep-sea creatures found in Australia’s abyssal zone include the adorable Dumbo octopus, the unfortunately named bony-eared assfish and the needle-toothed lizardfish.
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