Sometimes the first opportunity to see something occurs while you are actively destroying the habitat where it lives. Sounds like your friend's work took advantage of the access that deep sea trawlers would have to species unknown to science, allowing them to have a rough idea of their distribution. In a sense this is very useful to researchers who can argue the case that trawling is too destructive for that area due to the presence of species new to science.

Trawling and mining, both activities mentioned in the article, can be very destructive to habitats. With the global race to lock up sources of rare elements and elements that are more commonly found in conflict zone nations the sea floor is seen as the best source for some of these. The manganese nodules that I learned about in geoscience classes decades ago are targeted by miners today who will have no qualms about scraping the seafloor clean just as those fishing fleets strip the oceans of wild fish species.

Wow! It's amazing how little it seems we've explored of the deep ocean, whenever I hear about it. A whole other world down there, lying in wait... the frontiers of our own planet have yet to be conquered!

yeah, calling these sharks who are native to our world 'alien' is kinda off-putting and obviously click-baity.

LLMs are obsessed with hidden, never seen before goblins - I suspect this is why this story has been doing so well.

https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

There is not much we can do/build with nature. Even if everyone would take idea of "protection/inspiration", there are not many sustainable business models towards that direction. Nature is more aligned with inward observation / meditation, which is more aligned with Eastern tradition.

I am sorry but why are you assuming "nature" cares? We benefit from the climate which allowed us to prosper and evolve but there have been periods of time on earth where nature was absolutely inhospitable to life. We just want to keep nature the way it works best for us but that is not protection.

At least it didn't show the "give us your email to subscribe to our spam" the moment you scroll a milimeter down the page. I started subscribing "admin@theirdomain.com" every time i get a popup like that... maybe i should start using some regulator (fcc,..) email instead.

Yes, there is an issue with exploration lights effecting native life.

Recent attempts to capture a giant squid on video were only realized when they switched the lights off.

They can...swim away

or have little vision to begin with

Probably, most sharks have nictitating membranes to protect the eye, but this family of sharks didn't evolved one apparently. In any case, they can avoid easily the light source swimming away.

Glid vs glided, slid vs slided are examples of the inconsistency of the English language. Glided is more common than glid, and slid is more common than slided. Linguistics says that that makes slide an ‘irregular’ verb, but that’s basically a circular definition.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glid

They are synonyms

It is glided. "Glid" is not a word in the English language.

We gotta know what's in it for us