Where in the world can you find Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Chopin along with other musical masters all in one place?
You could look in the obvious places – in a record store, a museum of music and arts or at a classical concert – but how about at the bottom of the sea?
The Musicians Seamounts are a 750-mile-long chain of around 65 underwater mountains in the Pacific Ocean. Most of the subsea mountains are between around 2,000 and 4,000 metres tall (1.2 to 2.4 miles) and, at around 162,163 square miles, they cover an area bigger than Germany.
Around 25 of the seamounts in the group are named in honour of famous composers and musicians, including Handel, Haydn, Stravinsky and Schubert.
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“The theme was proposed in 1959 by Henry Menard, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,” explains Marine Science Institute, The University of Texas at Austin on its website. “Scientists were finding so many seamounts that they couldn’t name them all. So, they named groups of them for musicians, geologists, and others.”
The seamount chain was formed by ancient volcanic eruptions between 98 million and 47 million years ago (from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene Period).
When NOAA scientists visited the region in 2017, they were blown away by the amount and diversity of corals, sponges and marine life they saw there. Sightings included glass sponges, arrowtooth eels (Illyophis), rattail fish (Coryphaenoides) and swimming marine worms (Teuthidodrillus).
They also saw strange, elongated fishes with tapered bodies known as cusk eels (Ophidiidae). “Despite their eel-like appearance, with long, thin bodies and bulbous heads, cusk eels are not true eels,” says NOAA Ocean Exploration. Their strange shape makes them look like huge tadpoles.
On one dive, the researchers saw a rather adorable type of anglerfish known as a red coffinfish (Chaunacops coloratus) with a little lure in the middle of its face. Their round, red bodies covered in tiny fur-like spines make them look more like a soft toy than a deep-sea creature.
“Most individuals are pink or pinkish red, with prominent prickles on the head and body, and short cirri [fleshy growths],” writes NOAA Fisheries. “They are usually, but not always, seen in a characteristic posture with one pectoral fin braced like a hand against a rock and the other placed down on sand or sediment.”
These little fish are sometimes called red sea toads because of their adorable froggy faces.
In these waters, they have also spotted a highfin lizardfish (Bathysaurus mollis) – a deep-sea predator with a haunting grin. “Bathysaurus have beautiful, yellow eyes and a mouth full of impressive teeth,” says NOAA Ocean Exploration.
Their gob full of needle-like gnashers help them to pounce on tasty prey. They are apex predators in the abyss and are known to strike at other large fishes,” they add.
At Mendelssohn Seamount, scientists saw an orange sea spider prowling across a bamboo coral like a leggy model.
The abundance of life around the Musicians Seamounts could be because of how the underwater mountains bring food into the area. “Seamounts are known to accelerate currents and create eddies that can scour sediment from the seafloor, concentrate larvae and other plankton, and enhance food supply,” write the authors of NOAA’s 2017 expedition report.
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These structures can also act like a service station for larvae and migratory animals travelling through the open ocean, they explain: “Because there are no true boundaries in the ocean, the Musicians Seamounts chain potentially acts as a source of genetic diversity.”
