Explore the Mediterranean Sea at night where lesser-seen creatures thrive in the dark. This mysterious footage, filmed near Ponza Island off the coast of Italy, documents the magnificent marine life. It’s part of a documentary project by the Aquatilis dive team led by marine biologist and photographer Alexander Semenov, who writes:

The World Ocean is as close as you can get to outer space without leaving Earth. It’s an entirely different universe, nothing like the life we have on land. And while people dream about alien life forms from other planets, there is another universe right here, closer than anyone expects.

The Aquatilis mission promotes environmental conservation through high-quality videos and photography. Semenov continues:

The World Ocean is a living system of unimaginable scale: the oceans take up 71% of the surface of our planet and life is dispersed in the whole volume, not just the surface. All the exploration of the oceans, including divers, deep water robots, and manned submarines is actually nearly negligible. During the last 2000 years we have discovered a little more than 236 000 species of marine organisms, and according to scientists’ estimates, that is only 8-10% of what really lives in the oceans. This means, that somewhere in the depths there are 2-3 million species that have never been seen by human eyes. Ever. We do not even know what they might look like!

However, most people do not even know the look of many creatures that scientists are aware of. Everyone knows about sharks, whales, octopi, jellyfish and some other large marine animals, which have made their way into movies and encyclopedias. But the average person has never heard of salps, siphonophores, comb jellies, appendicularians, ascidians and many many others. My work aims to show a completely different world full of strange and wildly interesting things.

Visit Coldwater.Science for more. Then watch another Aquatilis film: A sea angel under ice in the White Sea.