There is something quietly unsettling about the fact that between 30 and 60 percent of marine life has never been formally described by science. Not because the animals don’t exist — they do, in extraordinary numbers — but because getting to them, collecting them intact, and transporting their fragile bodies to the surface has always been the problem. The deep ocean is not cooperative. It is cold, pressurized, and dark, and the things that live there are often so delicate that the act of collecting them destroys precisely what you were trying to study.
That tension has sat at the heart of deep-sea biology for decades. Watching it play out in the control room of a research vessel — researchers hunched over monitors, remotely guiding a robot hundreds of meters below — you get a sense of how much patience this work demands. A multidisciplinary team led by the University of Rhode Island, working in close collaboration with MBARI’s Bioinspiration Lab, has now published findings in Science Advances suggesting a genuine shift in how this can be done. Five years of work. Two research expeditions. And a set of technologies that, taken together, might finally change the math on deep-sea discovery.
The core idea is something the team calls a “cybertype” — a term that is admittedly clinical but hides something genuinely radical beneath it. Instead of hauling a fragile gelatinous creature to the surface and hoping it survives the trip, researchers now aim to collect everything that matters about an animal while it is still alive, still in its habitat, still behaving like itself. High-resolution 3D images. A full genomic readout. A record of which genes are actively expressing at the exact moment of encounter. The physical specimen, in this framework, becomes almost secondary.
MBARI’s contribution to this system is centered in its Bioinspiration Lab, where principal engineer Kakani Katija and her team have spent years building instruments that treat the ocean floor as a laboratory rather than an extraction site. One of those instruments, the DeepPIV system, projects a thin sheet of laser light into the water — the effect, Katija has noted, is not unlike watching dust illuminate in a beam of sunlight. That light scatters off particles around an animal, allowing researchers to construct a three-dimensional picture of its body and, more remarkably, to measure the tiny fluid currents it creates as it swims or feeds. It is non-invasive by design. The animal never knows the laser is there.
The EyeRIS camera, a plenoptic imaging system funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, adds another layer. It captures light from multiple angles simultaneously, producing three-dimensional data about tissue movement and particle fields that a conventional camera simply cannot see. Used together, these two instruments can produce a detailed portrait of a deep-sea creature — its shape, its motion, its internal flow dynamics — without anyone touching it.
Collecting genetic material is where things get more complicated. For that task, the team turned to an instrument developed at Harvard University called the RAD-2, a rotary-actuated dodecahedron that folds around an animal the way origami collapses into itself. It encloses the specimen gently, preserving a snapshot of its genetic activity at the exact moment of collection — including the transcriptome, the complete record of which genes are switched on. During one expedition, the team used this system on a gossamer worm observed swimming through the water column. Analysis of its preserved tissue revealed intense gene expression in the worm’s whisker-like appendages, suggesting those structures function as chemical sensors. It’s the kind of detail that would have been lost entirely in a conventional collection.
URI professor Brennan Phillips, who led the project, has been candid about what’s at stake. The backlog of unidentified marine species is not just a scientific inconvenience — it is a conservation problem. Without a baseline of what exists, there is no way to measure what is being lost. Deep-sea mining is expanding. Ocean temperatures are shifting. It’s still unclear whether any international policy framework can keep pace with the rate of change, but what seems certain is that the tools scientists have traditionally used to track marine biodiversity were never going to be fast enough. A system that can collect 14 tissue samples a day, alongside terabytes of imagery, changes that calculus meaningfully.
There’s a sense, watching this research unfold, that it represents a broader shift in how ocean science thinks about its relationship with the creatures it studies. Catch-and-release, non-invasive, digitally shareable — these are not just methodological choices. They reflect a growing recognition that the ocean is not an unlimited resource to be sampled at will. The cybertype, for all its technical complexity, is ultimately about restraint. About learning everything you can while leaving the animal exactly where you found it. In the deep sea, that turns out to be the hardest thing to do — and possibly the most important.
