New discoveries from the deep

A remarkable area of marine diversity has been discovered in the cold depths of the ocean in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. A joint American and Indonesian expedition is using a remotely operated vehicle, called Little Hercules, at depths of 3,700m (2.3 miles) to explore an area in the region of the Sangihe and Talaud islands. Tim Shank, the expedition’s lead scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, says the diversity of large animas found rivals anything in similar habitats anywhere in the world. The team have spotted 30-40 new species just in the past week of diving. Little Hercules is cruising over hydrothermal springs, abyssal muds and the rocky tops of seamounts—a kind of underwater mountain. Distinctive corals live down here, and with them a specialised fauna. Two chirostylid crabs (pictured above) spend their adult lives only in one particular antipatharian black coral. Sea stars, crabs, shrimp and worms live in the limbs of these corals as birds and insects do in the branches of trees in a rainforest. The team are also gathering intriguing evidence for the existence of a deep ocean “Wallace Line”. This is an area named after Alfred Wallace, who in the 19th century noted that the land-based fauna on either side of this line was distinctly different. More information can be found here.

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