Species Discovery at the First Transatlantic Cable

Perhaps Carl Siemens would have liked to telegraph such a message directly from the CS Faraday in the spring of 1875, but this was anything but an exploration trip. The cable ship was out on the Atlantic to lay a communications cable and suddenly it broke. Finding the two ends was difficult, so there were more important things to do.

In addition, Carl had no idea what kind of slimy creatures he had pulled along with the cable ends from the bottom of the sea at a depth of almost 3,400 meters. Nevertheless, he made sure that the “slimy ball” was preserved in alcohol. 

The catch finally got to the Königliches Zoologisches Museum in Berlin via Carl's older brother Werner Siemens, co-founder of the Berlin telegraph construction company Siemens & Halske.

It wasn't until three years later that these deep-sea catches were given a name. Namely by Theophil Studer. The cnidarian specialist from Bern, Switzerland, had returned home in 1876 from a circumnavigation with the corvette Gazelle. During the trip he had collected, among other things, deep-sea Siphonophorae, which he wanted to describe as a new species. 

Siemens’s material from the Atlantic, which the Director of the Zoological Museum had given him to determine, should serve as a comparison. The label, which may already have been written on board the CS Faraday and is still stuck to the collection glass today, only identified the contents as Animal matter, Polypos. Studer immediately recognized that this “animal material” was also Siphonophorae.

In his treatise “On Siphonophores of Deep Water” from 1878, Theophil Studer described the animals that had been rescued from the depths of the Atlantic thanks to the accident during the laying of the first permanently functioning transatlantic cable by the Siemens brothers. He recognized a new genus and species in them. Their name: Bathyphysa abyssorum. 

The body of this animal, which is up to one meter long, is a colony of polyps, which are responsible for the buoyancy, the acquisition of food, the reproduction and the defense of the entire organism, and which are accordingly specialized.

Enthusiastic about the presumed diversity of organisms in the deep sea, Studer closes his description with the recommendation that ships engaged in depth research should in future collect all objects adhering to the cable when hauling in, preserve them in alcohol, and hand over to competent for examination.

With over 30 million objects, the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin houses the largest natural history collection in Germany. It is the museum's core infrastructure, comprising objects from the time of the origin of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago until today and contains a large number of type specimens.

The collection is constantly being developed and available for a wide range of research, from the natural sciences to the arts, humanities and citizen science.

This story was first published in "The Nature of Things", the museum's bestseller book connecting nature and culture and looking from different perspectives on objects which are researched in the collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.