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The deep ocean : life in the abyss
The deep ocean comprises more than 90 percent of our planet's biosphere and is home to some of the world's most dazzling creatures, which thrive amid extreme pressures, scarce food supplies, and frigid temperatures. Living things down here behave in remarkable and surprising ways, and cutting-edge technologies are shedding new light on these critically important ecosystems. This beautifully illustrated book leads you down into the canyons, trenches, and cold seeps of the watery abyss, presenting the deep ocean and its inhabitants as you have never seen them before.
Book
Protistan grazing impacts microbial communities and carbon cycling at deep-sea hydrothermal vents
Microbial eukaryotes (or protists) in marine ecosystems are a link between primary producers and all higher trophic levels, and the rate at which heterotrophic protistan grazers consume microbial prey is a key mechanism for carbon transport and recycling in microbial food webs. At deep-sea hydrothermal vents, chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea form the base of a food web that functions in the absence of sunlight, but the role of protistan grazers in these highly productive ecosystems is largely unexplored. Here, we pair grazing experiments with a molecular survey to quantify protistan grazing and to characterize the composition of vent-associated protists in low-temperature diffuse venting fluids from Gorda Ridge in the northeast Pacific Ocean. Results reveal protists exert higher predation pressure at vents compared to the surrounding deep seawater environment and may account for consuming 28 to 62% of the daily stock of prokaryotic biomass within discharging hydrothermal vent fluids. The vent-associated protistan community was more species rich relative to the background deep sea, and patterns in the distribution and co-occurrence of vent microbes provide additional insights into potential predator–prey interactions. Ciliates, followed by dinoflagellates, Syndiniales, rhizaria, and stramenopiles, dominated the vent protistan community and included bacterivorous species, species known to host symbionts, and parasites. Our findings provide an estimate of protistan grazing pressure within hydrothermal vent food webs, highlighting the important role that diverse protistan communities play in deep-sea carbon cycling.
Journal Article
The blobfish book
Introduces a variety of fish that live in the deepest zones of the ocean, including viperfish, jellyfish, jewel squid, and the blobfish.
Book
Ploughing the deep sea floor
Bottom trawling is a fishing technique whereby heavy nets and gear scrape along the sea bed, and is shown here to disturb sediment fluxes and modify the sea floor morphology over large spatial scales.
Sea-floor disturbance due to bottom trawling
The direct impact of bottom trawling on local fish populations has received much attention, but trawling also affects other aspects of the ocean environment. This paper shows that bottom trawling — a commercial practice in which heavy nets and gear are dragged along the ocean floor — induces sediment reworking and erosion, causing the gradient of the sea floor to become smoother over time. This reduces the morphological complexity of deep-sea environments. The authors draw parallels between the effects of bottom trawling at sea and intensive agriculture on land, with the important difference that, on land, ploughing takes place once or twice a year, whereas, at sea, bottom trawling can be a frequent occurrence.
Bottom trawling is a non-selective commercial fishing technique whereby heavy nets and gear are pulled along the sea floor. The direct impact of this technique on fish populations
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,
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and benthic communities
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,
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has received much attention, but trawling can also modify the physical properties of seafloor sediments, water–sediment chemical exchanges and sediment fluxes
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,
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. Most of the studies addressing the physical disturbances of trawl gear on the seabed have been undertaken in coastal and shelf environments
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,
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, however, where the capacity of trawling to modify the seafloor morphology coexists with high-energy natural processes driving sediment erosion, transport and deposition
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. Here we show that on upper continental slopes, the reworking of the deep sea floor by trawling gradually modifies the shape of the submarine landscape over large spatial scales. We found that trawling-induced sediment displacement and removal from fishing grounds causes the morphology of the deep sea floor to become smoother over time, reducing its original complexity as shown by high-resolution seafloor relief maps. Our results suggest that in recent decades, following the industrialization of fishing fleets, bottom trawling has become an important driver of deep seascape evolution. Given the global dimension of this type of fishery, we anticipate that the morphology of the upper continental slope in many parts of the world’s oceans could be altered by intensive bottom trawling, producing comparable effects on the deep sea floor to those generated by agricultural ploughing on land.
Journal Article
Microbial Communities of Deep-Sea Methane Seeps at Hikurangi Continental Margin (New Zealand)
Notes how the methane-emitting cold seeps of Hikurangi margin (New Zealand) are among the few deep-sea chemosynthetic ecosystems of the Southern Hemisphere known to date. Compares the biogeochemistry and microbial communities of a variety of Hikurangi cold seep ecosystems. Includes highly reduced seep habitats dominated by bacterial mats, partially oxidized habitats populated by heterotrophic ampharetid polychaetes and deeply oxidized habitats dominated by chemosynthetic frenulate tubeworms. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Journal Article
Editorial: 16th deep-sea biology symposium
[...]B. ellinorae was assigned as a subspecies of B. brucei. [...]H. dubia is not restricted to hadal depths, but it can occur between 4,700 m and 10,800 m, and it is found in multiple broad oceanic regions including the Southern, Northwest and Central Pacific, as well as the Northern and Southern Atlantic. [...]two articles focused on improving knowledge of deep-sea species biology. [...]there were significant new knowledge contributions to the biodiversity and ecology of chemosynthesis-based ecosystems. [...]Avila et al. investigated the role of whale falls as chemosynthetic refugia, by studying nematodes colonizing whalebones between 1500-4204 m in the Southwest Atlantic Ocean, off Brazil.
Journal Article
Journey into the deep : discovering new ocean creatures
\"Join scientists on a journey from coastlines to the deep seafloor and meet the weird, wonderful, and unforgettable creatures they discovered along the way\"--P. [4] of cover.
Book
Influence of seabed heterogeneity on benthic megafaunal community patterns in abyssal nodule fields
Polymetallic nodule fields, at 3000–6000 m depth, harbour some of the most diverse seabed communities in the abyss. In these habitats, nodules are keystone structures for many sessile species that require hard substrate for growth. The combination of exposed nodules and background sediment increases the heterogeneity of these habitats compared to nodule-free fields, and thereby potentially influences the assembly of animal communities across space. Polymetallic nodule patches can vary in size, shape and nodule density; however, the effect of these variations on benthic communities remains largely unclear. Understanding the role of nodule-habitat type (defined by nodule size and density) and seabed heterogeneity on biodiversity is urgently needed to accurately assess the impacts of potential nodule removal in areas like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region targeted for deep-sea mining. Here, we explored variations in benthic invertebrates (megafauna > 10 mm) across space and nodule-habitat types within an abyssal seascape. We quantified changes in megafaunal density, diversity and community structure using quantitative seabed imagery in four study areas. Study areas were separated by distances of 1–110 km and exhibited varying levels of seabed heterogeneity, as defined by the proportions of different nodule-habitat types present in each area. We found that different nodule-habitat types harboured distinct assemblages. Areas with higher nodule coverage supported higher megafaunal densities, while areas with larger, sparsely distributed nodules had higher diversity. Higher species richness and distinct community structure were associated with the most heterogeneous study area, which had multiple nodule-habitat types and nodule-free sediment patches. These results suggest that type of nodule habitat and degree of seabed heterogeneity are important drivers of local benthic megafaunal diversity patterns in abyssal nodule fields. By establishing a baseline prior to human disturbance, our study provides essential insights that should inform future monitoring programmes, mining regulations and biodiversity conservation in this area.
Journal Article