A sea cucumber called Loki leads 57 newcomers from Argentina's pitch-dark canyon

Off Argentina, the Mar del Plata submarine canyon plunges deeper than 3,500 meters — and it has just yielded 57 species new to science. The Schmidt Ocean Institute's robot SuBastian filmed the deep live to more than four million viewers; then twenty taxonomists from Latin America and Europe spent two weeks in a Buenos Aires workshop sorting the haul: 20 copepods, 22 echinoderms, 14 corals and kin, five entirely new genera. Star of the show is 'Loki,' a sea cucumber with horn-like appendages found 2,577 meters down. Every discovery is logged on the open Ocean Census NOVA platform, and a follow-up expedition is already planned for February-March 2027.