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creatures like submerged Portuguese men-o’-war, and similar to those beautiful beings are composed of a colony of individuals, which perform separate functions, such as flotation, swimming, stinging, feeding, and breeding, all joined by the common bond of a food canal. Here in their own haunts they swept slowly along like an inverted spray of lilies-of-the-valley, alive and in constant motion. In our nets we find only the half-broken swimming bells, like cracked, crystal chalices, with all the wonderful loops and tendrils and animal flowers completely lost or contracted into a mass of tangled threads.4
They encountered yellowtails, pilot fish, blue-banded jacks, and other so-called surface fish at surprisingly low depths. Silvery squid shot past, and lantern fish. At 800 feet they passed through a cloud of copepods, as well as the roundmouth cyclothones. Too often the transient beam of the spotlight frightened away the creatures it was supposed to illumine. At 1,000 feet they took stock of their surroundings. Stuffing box and door were dry, and the humidity was under such good control that they did not have to use their bandit handkerchiefs to keep the window from fogging. By 1,100 feet, the number of lights from animals increased as the darkness became ever more absolute. Will noted a jelly, its diaphanous folds waving slowly in the terrific pressure, and a transparent fourinch larval eel. Clouds of flying snails sailed past, and small shrimps exploded in a blinding cloud of luminescent anti-ink when they bumped against the glass. A three-inch anglerfish swam past, its grotesque features topped by a pale, lemon-colored light on a slender tentacle, rows of sinister teeth glowing dully. Just above 1,400 feet, two eighteen-inch black sea eels swam past, and so did a strange sea dragon–like fish. Then Will had the rare treat of seeing a wholly new, unknown fish hang just outside the window for long enough to describe it fully. He grabbed Barton to verify his description, which was of a two-foot-long, pale buff creature, “alive, quiet, watching our strange machine, apparently oblivious that the hinder half of its body was bathed in a strange luminosity.” It was a color worthy of these black depths, like the sickly sprouts of plants in a cellar. Another strange thing was its almost tailless condition, the caudal fin being reduced to a tiny knob or button, while