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The Blue Planet - The Deep
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A thousand metres down, in the twilight zone, animals play a constant game of hide and seek. Most are transparent, hoping to pass unnoticed. Hatchet fish have flattened bodies and silvered sides that reflect any light and make them invisible. A fish called winteria looks like an underwater bushbaby with its two tubular eyes designed to look up at the surface to spot the silhouettes of potential prey.
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David Attenborough takes you on a journey to the abyss.
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Below 1,000 metres you enter the dark zone and an alien world. In a world where red light does not exist, dark red jellyfish and shrimps float by, confident that they are almost completely invisible. Predators here have massive teeth and enormous mouths as food comes along so rarely that they have to grab prey of any size. The hairy angler is the size of a beach ball and its body is covered in long antennae designed to pick out the movements of any prey foolish enough to venture close to its terrifying teeth. The fangtooth has the largest teeth in the ocean for its size - so big it can't close its mouth. Gulper eels can swallow prey as big as themselves.
The only light here is produced by the animals themselves through bioluminescence. Shrimps and jellyfish use this to confuse their predators while angler fish use giant flashing lures on their heads to attract their prey. Female angler fish also use their lures to hook a male. Just one tenth the size of their partner, a male completely fuses itself on to the female's body, becoming little more than an attached bag of sperm.
The continental slope, which extends for thousands of miles, gradually descends to the abyssal plain at 3,000 metres. Just occasionally the carcass of a dead whale drops right down to these great depths. With their acute sense of smell, thousands of hagfish are attracted to the carcass and out of nowhere a massive sleeper shark appears. As big as great whites, these are very slow moving sharks, perfectly adapted for a life in these energy deficient waters.
The abyssal plain covers over half the Earth's surface. Mostly it's as flat as a billiard table, but in places the seabed drops down into massive trenches miles wide. The deepest of these and the deepest point in the ocean is the Marianas Trench which drops to over seven miles below sea level. There are just five manned submarines in the world that can reach the abyssal plain so less than one per cent of it has ever been explored. Out of the black appears 'Dumbo', a deep sea octopus flying through the water on what look like large flapping ears.
In just a few places, along volcanic ridge lines, animals survive off energy produced by hot vents - molluscs, shrimps, crabs, fish and even octopus. When scientists discovered the hot vents just over 20 years ago they were amazed that so much life could survive totally without energy from the sun. Since their original discovery in 1979, a new species has been described every 10 days.
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