Far out at sea, a group of marine biologists are gathered around a screen. A pinky-purple blob swims out from the gloom and floats into view. “That’s amazing!” exclaims one of them. But what is it?
Using a remotely operated vehicle, they have filmed what is commonly known as a headless chicken monster (Enypniastes eximia). This deep-sea creature is a sea cucumber but is also referred to as a ‘Spanish dancer’ due to its graceful movements.
- This swimming sea cucumber looks like nothing you’ve ever seen
- "If harassed, it may violently eject its intestine and stomach out of its anus. But if the attack escalates, it finally explodes…"
While many sea cucumbers can swim, most get around by crawling on the seafloor. The headless chicken monster, however, is different as it can swim much longer distances by pulsing its fin-like ‘flaps’.
“I love sea cucumbers,” says Guadalupe ‘Lupita’ Bribiesca-Contreras, an applied scientist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, in the footage. “If they get upset, they can expel their whole gut and they still survive – they can regenerate the gut.”
The footage was filmed in 2023, when filmmaker Eleanor Mortimer joined a group of deep-sea scientists on their research vessel. They were studying the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which is one of the most remote regions on Earth. It takes around 12 days to reach from the nearest edge of land.
This vast abyssal plain is in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico and covers 4.5 million square kilometres (1.7 million square miles). It has an average depth of 5,000 metres. While it’s thought to contain extraordinary biodiversity, little is known about it.
- It looks like a pineapple crossed with a giant sausage – colossal ocean creature filmed crawling along seafloor
- Something huge was just filmed at the bottom of a deep, dark trench in the Pacific Ocean
Into the deep
To address this, London’s Natural History Museum is carrying out research in this zone, led by its Deep Sea Lab Group. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone also contains polymetallic nodules, which are potato-sized lumps of rock. These rocks contain large quantities of metals, which may be critical for future green technology such as producing electric vehicle batteries.
While no deep-sea mining is currently allowed in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the International Seabed Authority has issued licences to polymetallic nodule contractors for its exploration. Some researchers are concerned about the potential impact on the creatures that live there – many of them currently unknown to science.
Mortimer’s resulting documentary – How Deep Is Your Love – explores just some of this research, following the international team of scientists as they observe what’s down below.
“From the moment I started thinking about this film I always imagined the animals’ perspective on our various attempts to explore their world – what would a remotely operated vehicle from a science ship look like for animals used to perpetual darkness for centuries?” explains Mortimer.
“I decided to use the imaginative space of the film to bring the deep-sea animals into the human landscape, an inverse of the human exploration of the deep.”
Screenings of the film are taking place around the UK from September 2026.
