For many reasons, the sea floor remains an unfathomed, and largely unfathomable, mystery. Adventurers such as Jacques Piccard, dropping six miles down in bathyscaphes, touched only a dark valley or two in the deeps. For the rest, seafarers rely on sounding devices, which can mistake even a dense layer of cold water for an uncharted—and wholly imaginary—shoal. Last week, in Scientific American, Dr. Robert Dietz of the Navy Electronics Laboratory in San Diego, Calif., reported on yet another obstacle to sounding the depths: congregations of shrimplike crustaceans and lantern...
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