Plankzooka, on the left there, is two big tubes strapped on either side of the autonomous undersea rover Sentry.
We certainly admired the news Friday coming out of a marine science cruise that hasn’t even ended: They found a shipwreck a mile down while also pioneering a new device for gently and precisely sampling plankton at those crushing and dark depths.
But we couldn’t help but notice the “plankzooka’s” uncanny resemblance to a familiar cartoon character. Here’s an example of some of the juvenile plankton it collected around a methane seep on the sea floor.
A sampling of juvenile plankton from the deep sea.