A new 200-foot-long animal has just been discovered, and it’s sucking trash in the deep sea

This week, a team of marine biologists released the findings of a new sea creature slowly crawling through the deep ocean of the Gulf of Alaska.

The researchers – Francisco A Solís Marín, Andrea A Caballero Ochoa, Carlos A Conejeros-Vargas – are all professors at the Institute of Ocean Sciences and Limnology in Mexico and have dedicated their lives to marine exploration.

Their work, published in the Biodiversity Data Journal on June 26, describes a new species of deep-sea cucumber, a long, spindly animal with a “pale pinkish purple” color and zig-zagging rows of 214 feet of tube-like.

“New species of Synallactes from the Northeast Pacific” is also known as the McDaniel sea cucumber.

Conejeros-Vargas and his team named the new animal after Neil McDaniel, a Canadian naturalist who specializes in the study of sponges, corals, anemones — and of course, sea cucumbers.

Like other wild sea cucumbers, the McDaniel sea cucumber wanders the bottom of the sea looking for a bite to eat.

They can be found at sea depths ranging from 70 feet to 1,400 feet—and they use their hundreds of feet to move around and grab “the bottom sediment with its peltate tentacles.”

According to Arnold Rakaj, a marine biologist at the University of Rome, sea cucumbers feed on a steady diet of “fish waste, algae and other organic matter” peppered across the sandy sea floor.

In recent years, researchers have begun to realize just how beneficial sea cucumbers are when it comes to ocean health. They are even called “forecasters of the sea”.

“Sea cucumbers have a very important role, they are literally underwater vacuum cleaners,” biologist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg told Underwater Earth as he himself dived into a deep ocean.

Hoegh-Guldberg noted how sea cucumbers filter and clean the seafloor as they move, recycling nutrients in sand that leaves cleaner than it enters.

“They get food at the same time [they’re] keeping the sandy surfaces clean,” said Hoegh-Guldberg.

One of the byproducts of sea cucumber digestion is an increase in calcium carbonate (CaCO3), a compound that keeps corals alive and thriving.

Professor Maria Byrne, director of One Tree Island Research Station on the Great Barrier Reef, said sea cucumbers counteract the “adverse effects of ocean acidification”.

“In a healthy reef, the breakdown of calcium carbonate sediment by sea cucumbers and other biodegradants appears to be an important component of the natural cycle of calcium carbonate,” explained Byrne at the University of Sydney.

Sea cucumbers have been in decline due to overfishing and ocean pollution, but scientists hope to boost conservation efforts by spreading the word about the key role they play in their underwater ecosystems.

Fortunately, the discovery of this new species of sea cucumber hopefully signals that the tide is turning in the right direction for them — and their oceanic neighbors.

“Sea cucumbers provide an extra level of insurance against the things that are causing the coral to decline,” marine ecologist Cody Clements told NPR last spring.

“It doesn’t mean it’s going to fix everything, but we want to give them as much of a fighting chance as we can.”

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Header image via Nicholas D. / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)