A Nautilus!

Look at that!

Oh wow!

That's insane!

Let's see!

It's finally happened!

Oh my gosh, Samantha's going to be so sad she just handed over to me.

Five, five, five, five.

Don't stop tagging until it's gone.

Okay, okay, tagging, tagging.

I'm zooming in.

Yep, I'm going in.

A Nautilus! Come true.

Yes!

Oh, it's so beautiful.

Oh my goodness.

Let's stay here forever.

Turn the lasers off, lasers off, lasers off.

Lasers off, lasers off.

This is fantastic.

Jonathan, I will get you this ProRes ASAP.

Is Pat watching?

I am.

I'm just tagging this with exclamation marks, Jacob.

That is more than good enough.

This is definitely the new YouTube homepage.

They do exist, and they're real.

They're not unicorns.

It only took 15 years.

Is Pat there to tell us a bit, or Lori, about the last few times they saw these in the area?

Yeah, we've seen them for more or even subs of between 400 and about 1,000 feet.

We're a little bit deeper, we're 360 meters.

Wow.

That's so cool.

Okay, we are also freaking out in the lounge, by the way.

It's so cute.

Look at its little jet propulsion.

It's chugging along.

It is really moving.

Jet propulsion.

When you see a nautilus, are they by themselves, or do you typically run into them?

They're sort of solitary, but there are a lot of them at depth.

Oh, wow.

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a few more.

The nautilus population in Palau is stable, and the animals are doing well.

Oh, that's fantastic.

Palau has been a hotbed for nautilus research for the last 50 years.

Much of the first work that was ever done on living nautilus was done here.

Oh!

You drug Atlanta like 20 meters chasing that nautilus.

That was fantastic.

I guess with the various cameras, is there a way we can get sort of size or depth on the images with post-processing?

Is it another one?

I don't know.

I don't want to say anything.

I think it's another one.

Yes!

Can we zoom in, Jacob?

Another nautilus.

Here we go.

Here we go again.

This looks like it's behaving.

I can't believe it.

All you have to do to see a nautilus is start talking about internal waves.

Yeah, this is wonderful to see them out on the open sand like this.

Very exciting.

We've seen them along the reefs, along rocks, but this is very interesting to see them sitting out on the sand.

It certainly would imply that there aren't many predators coming along.

Hopefully those big seal sharks won't find them.

Find these guys, but it's very, very interesting.

Are we done and moving on?

Yeah.

I mean, it's very hard to leave time to put...

But we did have a lot to do, right?

We did have a lot.

All right.

Yeah.

Great.

Carrying on.

I think that's number three.

I knew there'd be another one, so we are at...

Push in there?

Again, look, this one's sitting out on the open bottom.

I can't believe we've seen three.

Just gorgeous.

Perfect timing.

Nautilus guys, I have to tell you, we're playing a joke on you.

We've got a half a dozen ceramic nautilus and we've got them out in this area.

Hey, you know what?

It's working.

So, nautilus have somewhat simple eyes.

They have pinhole eyes, which function almost exactly the same as pinhole cameras.

So, even if those were positioned in a way where they were on the back of the shell, the resolution is still very, very low.

So, is the nautilus hanging on in the sediment with its...

Do they call them tentacles?

Yeah, they're tentacles.

I don't think they're hanging on.

They use those beads.

How many tentacles do the nautilus have?

I've heard several dozen.

A species that we had on an exhibit at Monterey Bay Aquarium a few years ago had 90 tentacles. 90?

Yeah.

But it just depends on the species.

I don't know what this species has.

Google says more than 90 tentacles.

Great.

Wow.

Thank you, Google.

There's a nautilus.

Number four!

Oh my gosh.

I guess we better zoom.

Oh, they're so cool.

Something about the way they move just seems like it's wrong.

It's like watching a dinosaur.

Their body pattern...

It's like redefining my understanding of humans.

Yeah.

Their morphology hasn't changed in thousands, millions of years.

Do the patterns on the shells of these nautiluses... nautili... nautiluses... nautili...

I haven't decided.

Would those be able to help us tell them apart, like our fingerprints?

It's my understanding they probably would.

Each one is distinctive to an individual, I hope.

I don't know if anybody's ever done that.

I've seen plenty of shells over the years, but yeah, it could be an individual recognition factor.

So I guess that means there's a chance that this is one nautilus that keeps following us.

Yeah, well, you could take all those still images you've shot and put them one against another and check it out.

That'd be kind of fun to do.

They look like if you brought them into air, they would also hover there as well.

Like...

I'm just imagining nautiluses right behind our head or around our shoulder just floating along with us like familiars.

Like gravity doesn't mean anything to them.