The deep sea: a key player to be protected for climate and ecosystems

Flashy displays may seem easy to spot, but in the dark expanse of the deep, distance and the immense area can make even bright lights hard to see. Deep sea animals will often have enlarged eyes that can pick up even the faintest light, ensuring a rare encounter leads to a meal or a mating. The Phronima, an invertebrate resembling Ridley Scott’s Alien, uses two sets of eyes, one large set in front and one on the sides. Some animals also help themselves in the darkness by looking through their particularly large eyes in order to take advantage of the weak residual light.
One tiny plankton, a foraminfera, waits in the path of the migration and ensnares passing copepods, a migrating crustacean, in a web of protruding spines. A layer of these plankton create a dense mine field for the tiny crustaceans to swim through on their path each day. Along with the Gulf of Mexico, brine lakes have been discovered in the Red Sea and off the coast of Antarctica. It seems like an impossibility—coming across a lake at the bottom of the ocean. But due to chemical and physical properties of water, this is, in fact, a reality.

Food: Many good things come from above

• The USA and Japan are planning their techniques for first test extractions.
• Soon the skeleton is picked clean, but the fall is far from nutrient depleted.
• From the mesmerizing “mystery mollusc” to the carnivorous harp sponge, each discovery is a new piece of the puzzle.
• Deep-sea coral and sponge communities are largely untapped sources of natural products with enormous potential as pharmaceuticals, enzymes, pesticides, cosmetics and other commercial products (DSCC, n.d.).
• Exchanges with the Atlantic and Pacific can only take place via two comparatively narrow passages.
• Their carcass, pickled and preserved, serves as a warning of the toxic landscape below.
• This creates a global current system, driving the movement of water around the ocean, mixing warm higher salinity waters from the surface with deep waters which are cooler and less saline (NASA, 2009; NOAA, n.d.).

They use this feature to attract males, but also (and especially) prey species. For much of the deep ocean, food rains down from above in the form of marine snow. The term ‘marine snow’ is used for all sorts of things in the ocean that start at the top or middle layers of water and slowly drift to the seafloor. This mostly includes waste, such as dead and decomposing animals, poop, silt and other organic items washed into the sea from land. A cold seep is a place on the ocean floor where fluids and gases trapped deep in the earth percolate up to the seafloor.

Adaptation to hydrostatic pressure

With the help of anchored Oil platforms we can now reach depots at up to 2,000 m depth and exploit them. Remodelled tankers of the company Pertrobas transport oil in the Atlantic off the west coast of Brazil, from depths as far as 1,853 m. Experts say that even the extraction of oil from as far as 3,000 m would technically be possible already. What role the gas hydrate cycle holds in terms of being a steering mechanism in the global climate cannot be said yet, as exact measurements are still missing. Global warming, especially in the plain Polar Regions where vast amounts are held in Alaska, Greenland, Canada, Russia and Antarctica, would have devastating effects. The use of gas hydrates as an energy supply in the future is being discussed.

Nearly Every Whale Shark at This Tourist Destination Bears Human-Made Scars

• In addition to manganese and iron, these clumps contain valuable metals like copper, nickel and cobalt.
• And where there are fewer smaller organisms, there will eventually be fewer of the larger ones.
• Every expedition into the aquatic realms of the deep brings new realisations.
• The metabolic processes have reduced extremely at these constantly low temperatures.
• “Tell it I say pspsps or whatever that translates to in fish,” another TikTok user humorously commented, referring to the sound that pet parents make to attract the attention of companion animals.

Thus far little is known about this habitat and its inhabitants, as it has not been explored as excessively as the other zones. Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, James Cook, Charles Darwin and Alexander of Humbold are the names of the most famous circumnavigators. However, how deep the ocean is, whether there’s life down there and what kind of animals might be found down in the depths, were still unanswered questions. It is always cold, mostly with temperatures below 4 °C, that is what the American Captains Matthew Maury discovered.

Water column: generating counter pressure

Life and services provided by Deep Sea organisms depend very much on atmosphere and surface activity. As they are deprived of light, Deep Sea ecosystems are highly connected to food produced at the surface of the ocean, on which they depend greatly. Marine snow, a rain of organic matters, which drops from the surface, is often the base of the food web.

In Concareau in France the first ocean observation station was built in 1859, with further stations such as those in Naples (1872) and Helgoland (1892) following. The diversity and complexity that made up the captured animals was used as arguments for Darwin’s theory of evolution of the ‘whims of God’. In 1862 the German advocate of the evolution theory Ernst Haeckel, Professor for Zoology in Jena, published his monograph of the radiolarians. They primarily feed on carrion-eating amphipods, which can be found in abundance near their food sources.
Keep one eye out for Bonnelli’s cock-eyed, which clearly have one eye much bigger than the other. If disturbed, it will curl its arms up outwards and wrap them around its body, almost turning itself inside-out and, exposing spiny projections called cirri. They also have amazing bioluminescent displays with light organs on the tip of each arm and at the base of each fin. When disturbed, these can glow and pulse and the arms may writhe so that it becomes very difficult to tell one end of the vampire squid from the other. The literal translation of the Latin species name is ‘vampire squid from Hell’, a name inspired by its velvety jet-black to pale reddish cloak-like webbing and red eyes.

The state-of-the-art sub is equipped with hydraulic collecting arms that allow for the collection of marine life and the deployment of long-term monitoring devices on the deep reef. These brine lakes are a remnant of ancient seas that existed when dinosaurs roamed on land. Millions of years ago, during the Jurassic Period, a shallow Deep Sea sea existed where the Gulf of Mexico now sits. Cut off from the rest of the world’s oceans, the sea slowly evaporated, leaving behind a layer of salt up to 5 miles deep in some locations. By the time the ocean returned to that region, sediment had covered the salt, isolating it from the seawater. These worms house bacteria within their “roots” that take advantage of the sulfur in the bones to make energy in a process called chemosynthesis.
“Tell it I say pspsps or whatever that translates to in fish,” another TikTok user humorously commented, referring to the sound that pet parents make to attract the attention of companion animals. For additional information or images relating to this article, please email Deep-sea coral and sponge communities are largely untapped sources of natural products with enormous potential as pharmaceuticals, enzymes, pesticides, cosmetics and other commercial products (DSCC, n.d.). Anticipating vulnerabilities and defining efficient protection measures is a crucial issue, while many climate emergencies tend to leave behind this remarkable heritage, invisible to most of us. Seamounts are highly endemic regions, which means that species that are found here cannot be found elsewhere.