A deep-sea expedition off Argentina attracted attention in August 2025 when its live broadcast showed a starfish resembling Patrick from SpongeBob. However, the trip also collected animals that led to the identification of 57 new species. Scientists used SuBastian, a remotely controlled underwater robot, to collect them.
An international team later met at Universidad Maimónides in Buenos Aires. During a two-week workshop, they named the species and five new genera, which are broader groups used to classify living things. The discoveries included corals, sea cucumbers and small animals called copepods. Every copepod the team examined belonged to a species previously unknown to science.
Most of the animals came from Mar del Plata Canyon, which reaches more than 3,500 metres below the sea surface. The expedition took place aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research ship Falkor (too). It formed part of Ocean Census, a project working to record deep-sea life worldwide before threats such as climate change and seabed mining potentially disturb it. The findings improve understanding of marine life in the South Atlantic.
