Australian Museum scientist Yi-Kai Tea explores the weirdest realms of the ocean

The room is home to the smoke of an absinthe bar, and it looks like hallucinations are upon us. The moustachioed young fish scientist Dr. Yi-Kai Tea plunged both gloved hands into a vat of thin ethanol and lifted the severed head of a goblin shark. With its body and weight, I feel like I’m coming face to face with a murdered grizzly bear, but this creature’s mouth can detach from its monstrous head and attack like a xenomorph’s second mouth. Foreign.

This monster came from which corner of the pirate map was followed by which monsters? “It’s actually just off the coast of Sydney!” The tea sings brightly and lets the dark-eyed monster slip beneath the green depths.

We are in one of the Australian Museum’s underground collection caves, which house 1.75 million fish specimens. While Sydney’s proximity to underwater wilderness is thrown into sharp relief this week by rare shark attacks, the full range of otherworldly beasts we live with here are always on full display.

This room houses everything that can’t fit in a jar, showcasing large blue tanks of tea, fur seals with teeth frozen in dog-like grins, pickled lungfish, wobbegongs, a planktivorous basking shark, a dragon-like ribbon fish, a tiger shark pulled from the Parramatta River, and a tank layer filled with tawny oil oozing from the liver of a great white.

“The transition from not knowing something exists to knowing it does is a very powerful thing,” says Tea, 33, holding a prehistoric frilled shark. In her work as a taxonomist, Tea has introduced numerous new fish species to science and captured people’s attention with her discoveries through her Instagram personality. Fishman Kai.

Now curator of the museum’s fish collection, Tea launched a revolution in ancient science. Here taxonomy is no longer old, dusty and antiquated. This is popular culture. Guyliner. Goblin sharks.

Deep sea fish in childhood bedroom

Many of the fish that Cay has brought out of obscurity live in one of the ocean’s most mysterious realms: mesophotic reefs. These are the Upside Down of a coral reef; A twilight zone of purple, red and orange, 50 to 150 meters deep, covered with branching networks of algae, soft corals, sponges and gorgonians.

“Meso means middle in Latin, and photic means light,” says Tea. “It’s not completely dark. It’s like having all the lights in your apartment turned off at night and only being illuminated by the ambient moonlight and street light.”

“A lot of the mesophotic species are actually more colorful than the stuff in shallow water. You see things like Anthias and angels, and they’re like bright red, bright purple, bright yellow.”

Red is the first wavelength of light lost in the darkness; At a depth of 100 meters, redfish appear black and camouflaged. Many of the creatures in this shadow realm remain unidentified because it is too deep for traditional scuba diving and too shallow for bottom trawling. But Tea first encountered a mesophotic fish in an unexpected place: her childhood bedroom in Singapore.

“I had it as a pet in my aquarium, and at the time, in high school, it didn’t have a name yet,” Tea says. He pored over guidebooks, and no one could put a species name to the magnificent assemblage of tangerine scales and neon stripes waving around the tank.

“I remember thinking to myself: How could such a striking species be available in the pet trade but still be a new species and not have a name? Like, what? What are scientists doing?”

Skip a few years and degrees and Tea began working with colleagues to name her former pet: Cirrhilabrus isoscelesor pintailed fairy wrasse, was the first species he described. “That’s how I started my career.”

It now has more than 20 names: a cave-dwelling pink Anthia Pseudanthias tequila Because tequila reflects the drunken balayage of the sunrise. Nicknamed the fairy fish found in mesophotic reefs off the coast of Tanzania. cirrhilabrus wakanda For the setting of the Marvel movie Black Panther. A silver damelfish with distinctive yellow spines chrome color tingle For Tea’s mother Ting. Other fish in their article are named after alien warriors. Doctor Who and the gods of the underworld; all designed to spark the imagination rather than dazzle the eyes.

“Obviously, my perspective on my work and career has always prioritized science,” he says. “But there’s nothing to say I should stop here. It’s not just boring and stubborn, it needs to be exciting and intriguing.

“I want to make sure that the science I do is accessible and interesting to people who may not be aware of it. We work in a field where some of the early pioneers were literally Charles Darwin.” [Carl] “I think it’s noble to carry on the legacy of Linnaeus, Alfred Russel Wallace and them.”

Record-breaking dives unearth creatures from the deep

Tea assembled a team of the only people in the world who can dive to 150 meters to directly explore mesophotic reefs. Divers use respirators that recycle exhaled air by scrubbing carbon dioxide from the breath, and use a mixture of helium instead of traditional nitrogen, which becomes toxic at these depths and causes fatal narcosis.

The use of breathing apparatus ushered in a rise in fish science following the explosion of exploration with the advent of scuba diving equipment in the 1950s.

“Imagine being underwater for the first time and everything being a new species. This was truly the Golden Age of ichthyology,” Tea says of the ’50s. “And now we’re on to a second, smaller iteration where we realize we can use respirators to do the same thing; go deeper than we’ve gone before.”

An expedition he led last year saw the deepest ever collection of face-to-face specimens in Australia when diver Timothy Bennett caught a fairy perch at 152 metres. Despite the breathing apparatus, every dive is a sprint; The longer you spend in this pressure, the longer you have to depressurize as you go up. Divers must spend six hours returning to the surface, using nets to capture samples every seven or eight minutes.

One new study combining data Drawing from these extreme dives, images and videos captured by remotely operated underwater vehicles, and historical museum specimen data, Tea and colleagues reported 62 previously unrecorded species in the Coral Sea Marine Park. Forty-five are new to Australia and 21 are potentially new to science.

Among the first recorded in Australian waters was the strange wormtrap anglerfish, which lives in the deep sea on a bioluminescent bait that “hangs from the ceiling of its upper jaw like a chandelier” and its sideways-closing jaws close like the doors of a sports car.

This study is the first important step in conservation: You cannot protect what you do not know. Even deeper reefs are coping with bleaching from climate change; Even at 140 meters below, the temperature is a balmy 21 degrees. Tea, an effort funded in part by the Minderoo Foundation, was developed by California Academy of Sciences fish curator Dr. Together with Luiz Rocha, he organized a new expedition to the Coral Sea in the hope of collecting more samples. Fully discovering the creatures of the Coral Sea is more than a lifetime’s work, and it’s a quest he hopes future taxonomists will undertake.

“People often say that classification is a dying art and that it’s really just old people working in dusty museums who do it. I really want to not perpetuate that stereotype because classification is so important.” The samples Tea and his team collected are time capsules to be studied by the next generation.

“They serve as a reference for future scientists. A lot of my work is based on things collected in the 1800s. So we’re passing on that legacy.”

The Examine newsletter explains and analyzes science with a rigorous focus on evidence. Sign up to receive it every week.