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The open ocean is an alien place for human beings and for most of history it has been studied using very indirect means. A great deal of what we know about animals that live on land, from ants to elephants, is based on centuries of direct natural history observations of animals alive and in situ. There is no such body of observation of marine animals. Most of what we know about animals in the ocean comes from studying dead animals, collected in nets towed through ocean depths that we can rarely observe. Marine biological knowledge is flavored by the material we have to work with and this, in turn, is affected by the terminology that early scientists used in an attempt to describe the strange world that their nets revealed. Despite the recent development of more sophisticated ways of investigating the ocean, many marine scientists continue to adopt nineteenth-century terminology and approaches (such as the use of …