Deep Sea Gallery

Sunlight stops penetrating seawater in any meaningful way past about 3,300 feet, and the Deep Sea Gallery is built to feel like that boundary — dim, cold, and quiet, with most of what you see coming from the animals themselves. Our Pacific footballfish, a relative of the anglerfish, carries a bioluminescent lure on a stalk above its head, glowing thanks to a colony of light-producing bacteria it houses just for that purpose. Nearby, a vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) — despite the name, harmless to anything larger than plankton — drifts with its webbed arms flared, able to turn itself inside-out to expose defensive spines when startled.

Roughly 90% of deep-sea animals are believed to produce their own light in some form, whether to lure prey, startle a predator, or simply find each other in water where eyes are nearly useless otherwise. It’s one of the strangest, least-explored biomes on the planet — humans have mapped more of the Moon’s surface than the deep ocean floor.