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# Off Christmas Island, the deep sea just gave up 149 new species
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/christmas-island-seamounts/
- Published: 2026-09-12T07:14:37.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-12T07:15:25.000Z
- Description: Two voyages to the seamounts around Christmas Island and the Cocos Keeling Islands brought home more than a thousand kinds of animal, and 149 of them had never been seen by science.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Conservation, All stories

Far out in the Indian Ocean, on Australia's western edge, the seabed rises in a chain of drowned mountains around Christmas Island and the Cocos Keeling Islands. Nobody had ever looked at what lives on them. In the winter of 2021 and again in the spring of 2022, the research ship RV Investigator sailed out with 33 scientists led by Dr Tim O'Hara of Museums Victoria and sampled 22 of those seamounts, the two island groups and the abyssal plain between, from 94 metres down to 5,431 metres. Published this year in Deep Sea Research, the tally is 1,059 kinds of animal, 495 of them known species, and 149 that are new to science, with hundreds more still waiting on the genetic work that will tell one from another. Twenty three fish had never been recorded in Australian waters. Among the finds are a white sea cucumber from the genus Oneirophanta, a new greeneye fish caught beside a seamount already named Green Eye, a barnacle that lives as a parasite, and an orange, furry sponge crab that wears other animals on its back as armour. From the earlier voyage came a tripod fish that stands on its fins above the mud, a batfish shaped like a dumpling and a blind cusk eel with loose, gelatinous skin, and on the Cocos abyssal plain, five kilometres down, a graveyard of about a thousand shark teeth going back more than twenty million years, megalodon among them.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/06/0d067be9-327f-4730-b9c3-5f0cdd2bc6fa/content/images/2026/09/sun13-sea3.jpg)

Flying Fish Cove from the lookout at evening, Christmas Island, an Earth to Sea News original. Photo: Nicole McMahon.

In O'Hara's words, people had been around the islands in shallow water before, but no one had looked at life in the deep. He calls it the last frontier, and says we really need to know how the deep sea works. Dr Jim Barry, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California who sailed with the team, is amazed that every time they go somewhere and look carefully, they discover so many new species. Claire Rowe, one of the authors, puts it more simply: they are all weird and wacky, but really adapted to their environment, which is incredibly cool. In March 2022, between the two voyages, the waters around both island groups became the Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling Islands Marine Parks, together about 744,000 square kilometres of protected ocean, and Parks Australia now has a baseline of what lives inside them before anyone else arrives. Melanie Mackenzie, who looks after the sea cucumbers at Museums Victoria, summed up the deep on the first voyage: a lot of really blobby things, and a lot of really fangy things. More than 400 of them still need names, and the naming has begun.

### Sources and links

Our short take: the full story is by Emma Smith for Mongabay (26 August 2026), with details from the paper by Timothy O'Hara and colleagues in Deep Sea Research Part II (June 2026), CSIRO's voyage records for RV Investigator, Parks Australia, and ABC reporting by Alistair Bates (11 June 2026) and Alexandra Alvaro (29 October 2022). Photographs: a deep sea camera vehicle over seamount corals, NOAA, public domain; Flying Fish Cove from the lookout, an Earth to Sea News original by Nicole McMahon.

- [Mongabay, scientists discover 149 new deep sea species at remote Indian Ocean seamounts](https://news.mongabay.com/2026/08/scientists-discover-149-new-deep-sea-species-at-remote-indian-ocean-seamounts/)
- [Deep Sea Research Part II, the paper](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr2.2026.105651)
- [Parks Australia, Christmas Island and Cocos (Keeling) Islands Marine Parks](https://parksaustralia.gov.au/marine/parks/)