The fact that we continuously discover new species, almost daily, is a reminder of how important protecting untainted ecological areas and promoting biodiversity really is.
There are untold creatures we, as a species, are destroying before ever having had the chance to know… some of them in the most unlikely of places… This story from Nat Geo this week is a case in point:
An unnamed new species of Yeti crab swarms near hot, mineral-rich hydrothermal vents in the oceans off Antarctica—a newfound “lost world” of strange deep-sea species.
“A camera-equipped submersible robot filmed species such as barnacles, crabs, anemones, and even an octopus, all of which are mostly colorless and live in utter darkness at depths of 7,875 feet (2,400 meters), according to a new study.
About 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) east of the southern tip of South America, “this is a new province of deep-sea life, something like a new continent, and it’s a place we’ve been trying to [reach] for a long time,” said study co-author Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.
“It harbors some of the lushest abundance of life I have ever seen in the deep ocean,” he said.
An abundance of life in supposedly the most inhospitable of places! In utter darkness, at incredible pressures andfacing intense heat gusts!
Scientists are discovering that the ocean floor may teem with the same variety and diversity of life as a tropical rainforest!
As seen in this startling report (via Wired) which shows how a mere handful of seafloor mud may contain as many species as are found in a square meter of tropical rainforest. The fantastic assemblage seen above was gathered from a single scoop of mud, about 2 inches deep and 5 inches across.
“It’s easy, when you get away from the coast, to think of the oceans as a homogeneous blue. It’s a lot more complex than that,” said biologist Craig McClain of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.
McClain and colleagues collected the mud while surveying distributions of seafloor organisms, the lives of which are shaped by “marine snow” — a slow, steady, shower of organic particles that drift down from high in the water column.
Like terrestrial snow, the deep-sea-life-sustaining version doesn’t collect uniformly but gathers in drifts and eddies. In a paper published last year in Marine Ecology, McClain and others showed that, depending on snowfall, seafloor communities could vary wildly in the space of a few feet. In terrestrial terms, it was a bit like finding deserts and swamps separated by footsteps.
In a December Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper, the researchers again looked at seafloor distributions — but this time, rather than surveying one small seabed plot, they took samples from across the Atlantic Ocean.
They found large-scale, trans-Atlantic patterns, somewhat reminiscent of the vast and elegant patterns seen in blooming plankton, but not measured before on seafloors.
“The oceans are not as uniform as we have a tendency to think of them,” said McClain. “When you actually look at the ocean, you find that it’s a mosaic.”
On the other side of the globe….this video from Miljøstatus i Norge (State of the Environment Norway) gives you a front row seat to the impact of climate change on arctic sea ice.
So, in the same week, scientists at one pole are discovering new life forms, while at the other, another group are discovering just how quickly we are eradicating the chance of their survival.
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