Abyssa
A portfolio of the deep
The sea,
drawn by hand
59 ocean creatures, assembled piece by piece.
Coming to the App Store
The North Atlantic is free.
Each one arrives in pieces.
A plate comes to you cut up and tipped out. You find the edges, then the light, then the animal.
Set it at your own pace.
No timer, no score, no streak, no way to fail. Choose the cut you have time for — a quiet quarter hour, or a long slow descent — and leave it half-finished for as long as you like.
Then read the story.
Every finished plate opens three short texts: what it is like to meet the animal, what is known about it — and one honest open question that nobody has answered yet.
The third act
59 animals.
59 open questions.
Not trivia, and not a fact of the day. Each one is something genuinely unresolved about the animal you have just assembled — quoted here from the app, word for word.
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Conger conger
European Conger · 46 m
Still unknown
No one has ever directly observed conger eels spawning. The location, somewhere in the deep Atlantic, is known only from where the smallest larvae have been netted and from the direction they drift afterwards. How the young then find their way to European coasts, having never made the journey before, is likewise a matter of inference. This is an animal common enough to be caught from a pier, whose most important act has never been witnessed.
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Melanocetus johnsonii
Humpback Anglerfish · 3660 m
Still unknown
That fusion should be impossible. Any vertebrate should reject another individual's tissue outright, and it turns out these fish have dismantled the immune machinery that would do the rejecting — losing the antibody system that every other jawed vertebrate depends on. How they survive infection without it is entirely unexplained, and it is one of the most surprising findings in vertebrate biology in decades.
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Eurypharynx pelecanoides
Gulper Eel · 6000 m
Still unknown
Nobody has watched one feed. The ballooning behaviour was only filmed for the first time in 2018, by chance, and it is not clear whether the animal is engulfing a volume of water and straining it, taking a single large item, or doing something else again. For an animal built almost entirely around its mouth, how that mouth is actually used remains open.
The descent
Four seas.
The light runs out.
The paper darkens as you descend, from a warm ivory at the surface to near-black four kilometres down.
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The North Atlantic
Surface to 200 metres · 15 plates · free
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The Coral Triangle
Surface to 40 metres · 15 plates
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The Southern Ocean
200 to 1 000 metres · 15 plates
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The Trenches
1 000 to 6 000 metres · 14 plates
Plainly
What it is
- 59 species · four seas · the North Atlantic free
- One-time purchase, no subscription
- No advertising · no data collected · works offline
- iPhone and iPad · full VoiceOver support
- English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Türkçe
On the illustrations
The illustrations in Abyssa are AI-assisted works, made for this game in the spirit of nineteenth-century natural history plates. They are not reproductions of historical artefacts, and they are not scans or copies of any existing work.
The North Atlantic is
free and complete.
Coming to the App Store