They have some really cool pressure capsules for bringing deep sea specimens to the surface, can’t imagine it wouldn’t work for bacteria and such, but the actual studying of it would be very difficult.

Like the blob fish, which was really just a fairly normal looking fish that essentially ruptured into a pile of goo under the lack of pressure, the cells they would be trying to study would be really really difficult to do anything with.

You’d probably have to create a whole special automated lab for them, maybe even a whole mess of different types for different environments, but making a rover-type craft and studying them in situ would probably be much easier. Like the mars rovers, but close enough to control live.

Personally, I’m partial to sending people down to work on deep sea labs to study this stuff similar to the Rifters series by Peter Watts. It seems fascinating to be modified to breathe underwater and survive the pressures.

Link is to the archive.org full copy of Starfish, book one of the Rifters trilogy, all of which were released entirely free under a Creative Commons license, and are absolutely amazing imo. Wild ride of insanity and destruction. All of his work that I’ve read has been great.

Gotta catch them all.

I think this meme misremembers the idea "we know more about the moon than our oceans" which is much more believable.