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Seagoing ROVs have been used to locate many shipwrecks, including that of the RMS Titanic, the Bismarck, USS Yorktown, and SS Central America. In some cases, such as the SS Central America and airline crashes such as Alaska Airlines flight 261, ROVs have been used to recover material from the sea floor and bring it to the surface.
Remotely operated vehicles tend to be highly specialized, with some designed for scanning wide swaths of the ocean floor while others are designed for photography and recovery. A number of deep sea animals and plants have been discovered or studied in their natural environment only through the use of ROVs: examples include the jellyfish Bumpy and the eel-like halosaurs.