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Undersea Telescope

This stealthy-looking vehicle is a VPR, or Video Plankton Recorder, which images plankton and particles as it is towed through the water while software on the ship automatically identifies the organisms it sees. It could also be thought of as a telescope that scans vast, unexplored darkness of inner space to catalog the vast array tiny, unseen lifeforms sharing our planet. Developed at WHOI, the VPR is currently on a six-week voyage from the Marshall Islands to Panama to collect the first high-resolution data on how plankton species and abundances are distributed across the Pacific.(Illustration by Jayne Doucette, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)