Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're going to be starting a discussion about animal life in the deepest parts of the ocean, specifically the deep ocean's predators, looking at what it takes to be an active hunter in the deep.

And I thought a good place to start off with this series would be the story that inspired me to look at this topic.

And that was the discovery last year of a new species known as Delcibella Kamanchaca.

You may have seen stories about this.

It was covered in some popular press.

But the finding was described in a November 2024 paper published in the journal Systematics and biodiversity by Johanna Weston,

Carolina Gonzalez, Ruben Escribano, and Osvaldo Ulloa. And the paper was called A New Large Predator, Amphipida Eucerity,

hidden at haital depths of the Atacama Trench.

Now, one of the things that really got my attention when I was first reading about this

was simply what this animal looks like.

We'll get to a physical description of it in just a minute.

But the other thing that I thought was really interesting is the ecological question. How an

animal like this makes its living in such an environment, what it takes to be a predator so far

down in the ocean. And we'll be continuing to explore that question as we move on in the

series. But so the authors of this paper included scientists affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic

Institute in the United States and the Instituto Millennio de Oceanography, which is based at the

Universidad de Concepcion in Chile.

Now, again, this paper was marking the discovery of a new species of oceanic predator, and the name

they gave to the new predator was Delcibella Kamenchaca.

And this is interesting for a number of reasons. I'll do a full etymology in just a minute

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