"Mar del Plata Canyon: 57 New Deep-Sea Species Found in One Argentine Canyon"

In July 2025, a remotely operated vehicle called SuBastian descended into the Mar del Plata Submarine Canyon off Argentina, and millions of people watched live as it drifted past corals, crustaceans and creatures that looked invented. The crowd favourite was a bright orange sea star that resembled a cartoon character. The real news took more than a year to arrive: on 1 October 2026, the Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census and the Schmidt Ocean Institute announced that a two-week workshop in Buenos Aires had identified 57 species new to science, plus five new genera, from samples collected mostly on that single expedition.

The workshop ran from 13 to 24 July 2026 at Universidad Maimónides, bringing together 20 taxonomists and early-career researchers from Latin America and Europe, working with Argentina's CONICET and the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales. They examined specimens gathered by SuBastian from the research vessel Falkor (too), along with historical material from earlier Argentine expeditions. The headline number breaks down like this:

The most telling detail is not the total but the sampling fraction behind it. The 20 new copepods came from roughly 10 percent of the copepod material brought back, and every copepod in the batch examined turned out to be new to science. Copepods are among the most abundant animals on Earth and sit at the base of marine food webs, so a canyon where the commonest animals are entirely undescribed is not a curiosity — it is a sign that the baseline inventory for the deep ocean is far more incomplete than conservation plans assume.

There is an important distinction behind the headline, and it is worth stating plainly. Being identified as new to science is not the same as being formally described and named. The horned sea cucumber nicknamed Loki, filmed at 2,577 metres, is still waiting on a formal species name, as are other finds from the workshop. The count of 57 is a count of identifications recorded on Ocean Census NOVA, an open-access platform for newly discovered marine species — real, but provisional in the way all taxonomy is provisional until the formal descriptions are published.

What strikes me about this story is the method as much as the menagerie. The expedition itself was a spectacle, streamed to millions, but the discovery happened afterwards, in a room full of specialists comparing anatomy specimen by specimen. Deep-sea exploration keeps producing this pattern: the cameras go first, the taxonomy catches up slowly, and the gap between what we have seen and what we have actually identified keeps widening. Decisions about fishing, seabed mining and marine protection are being made against inventories that, in places like this canyon, barely exist yet.

That gap is also why I expect this number to keep growing rather than settle. Ninety percent of the copepod material from this expedition remains unexamined, and the workshop format — gather the specialists, work through the backlog together, publish the results openly — has now been shown to work at speed. The ocean is not running out of new species. We are running out of excuses for not looking, and for not funding the unglamorous work of naming what the cameras find.