Two glow-in-the-dark strangers from the deep: DNA and video reveal new species off Mexico

A mile down in the Gulf of California, where no sunlight reaches, strange chains of glowing animals drift — siphonophores, colonies of tiny creatures that live as one. Using DNA and years of underwater robot footage, a team led by Steven Haddock at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has sorted eight of these species into family order — and found two that science had never named. Bargmannia marlena carries stretchy orange stomachs; Bargmannia pyrosa burns red, found at 1,696 metres (about 5,564 feet) down. The work, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, shows the species stack themselves by depth, each evolving in its own dark layer of ocean. Every new name is a reminder of how much life the deep sea still holds, unnamed and uncounted.