Deep-sea video, watched by a machine
Abyss.
Big animals in deep-sea robot footage that don't look like anything we have on file.
Abyss works through thousands of hours of public ROV dive video, and watches research ships' live streams when they dive. Anything large that doesn't closely match about 20,000 reference images of known deep-sea animals gets flagged. Every flag is checked by hand before it shows up here.
Sightings
Each sighting is an animal the machine couldn't place and a person agreed looked unusual. Hover or tap a card to play the clip.
No sightings published yet
The machine is still watching.
Most of what it flags turns out to be a known animal at a strange angle, a rock, or a piece of the robot. A sighting gets published only after a person has looked at the clip and the closest known matches and still can't place it.
- ScanThe detector boxes every animal it sees.
- CompareEach animal is matched against the reference images of known ones.
- FlagBig ones with no close match go into a review queue.
- ReviewA person decides: unusual, known, or junk.
How it works
Off-the-shelf models from deep-sea research, wired together and pointed at footage nobody has time to rewatch.
Archive and live
NOAA Ocean Exploration's Okeanos Explorer ROV archive: more than 100,000 five-minute segments of public-domain dive video. When Nautilus or Falkor (too) streams a dive, the live feed is watched as well.
Find every animal
Two frames a second go through Megalodon, MBARI's detector trained on all of FathomNet. It draws a box around anything that looks like an organism, and each box is followed from frame to frame.
Does it look familiar?
Each animal is turned into a BioCLIP-2 embedding and compared with about 20,000 reference crops of more than 2,000 named deep-sea taxa from FathomNet. A weak best match combined with a large size raises the score.
A person decides
High scorers go into a private queue alongside their closest known matches. Only the ones that still look unplaceable get published, and promising ones are passed to the scientists who ran the dive.
Fine print
A sighting is not a new species. It means the animal didn't closely match anything in our reference set. That set is big but far from complete, and video is a poor witness: angle, lighting, distance and motion all make known animals look strange.
Naming a species needs a collected specimen and a taxonomist to describe it. The realistic best outcome for a sighting is drawing an expert's attention to it. During a live dive, that can mean the robot goes back and collects the animal.
Size is approximate. "Big" means the animal fills a large part of the frame. True size needs the ROV's laser scale, which Abyss doesn't read yet.