Deep Sea News

This is a new species of Bathyacmaea (Mollusca, Gastropoda, Patellogastropoda, Acmaeidae) currently under description by a japanese colleague. I have found hundreds of these individuals in my quantitative collections of chemoautotrophic communities at the Lau Basin hydrothermal vent fields. They reminded me of the Patella limpet I learned about in my undergrad inverts class.

Photos were taken by me with an Olympus digital camera. You can see the muscular foot in the center, head is on the left with its cephalic tentacles hanging out on the sides.

The World's Authoritative Guide to Vent Fauna

Clearly, last week’s Cephalopod Beak ID Contest was too easy! So This week’s contest is going to be a little harder. I’m testing you guys out, seeing where your limits are. This week I am highlighting the Handbook of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vent Fauna by veteran deep sea colleagues Daniel Desbruyères, Michel Segonzac and Monika Bright. It is a 2nd edition and was published by Biologiezentrum der Oberösterreichische Landesmuseen in Linz, Austria. It actually went out of print and they recovered their costs of production so they made it freely downloadable on their website!

Your task is to download and look at the amazing photos and line drawings of some of the planet’s most amazing critters. You will need to identify the species of worm using the clues in the poem below.

As always, fame and (not) fortune will follow as your name will be graced on the front page of the one and only Deep Sea News! First person to post a comment with the correct answer and include their name/pseudonym (or how you would like to be acknowledged) and a valid email address, will attain MAD TAXONOMIC SKILLZ STARDOM!

R U READY FOR THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE!!!!!!

My mouth don’t look like much

But when its time to munch

I spit my jaws

bare teeth and alls

to make you part of my lunch

Though my home is hot as an oven

I wear armor 1 less than a dozen

Adorned with beads

Hiding gills like trees

3 pairs papillae for island lovin’

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Yellow feather star (comatulid crinoid). Photo courtesy of MBARI.

We dove Wednesday on North Cleft (45.030268, -130.182166), a massive ravine over 100 meters deep and a few hundred meters wide formed by the spreading of the Juan de Fuca and Pacific Plates. At 2.5 kilometers depth, we explored three inactive hydrothermal vents, the tallest being 15 meters high, roughly the height of a 4-story building. As active vents these structures provided the raw materials of life to dense communities possessing several phyla, today we only saw hints of the communities that once were. Rusticles, iron stalagtites, hung off the extinct vents lending an eerie atmosphere to the scene. We quantified the communities on a lava flow dated to 1986 and a much older but yet to be dated lava flow. These are the next data points in our analyses of exploring how these communities shift through time.

A major storm in North Pacific drove us south on Wednesday, forcing us to abandon two more dives on the Cleft segment scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Instead we opted for additional dives on the President Jackson Seamount and the Gorda Ridge, which will keep us well out of the storm’s path. With deep-sea exploration you always count on lost days at sea due to equipment or weather. Contingency plans are prepared well in advance, and adjusted on the fly, to maximize our time and science on seafloor.

Chris Mah happy as a urchin in ethanol collecting echinoderms in the NE Pacific. Photo courtesy of MBARI.

On Thursday, we conducted the first of two dives on the President Jackson Seamounts. Our first dive (42.819173, -128.16031) began in a caldera floor. By dive’s end, we finished on the caldera wall nearly 300m shallower than we started. Unlike our previous dive sites with jagged landscapes of hardened lava, the caldera floor was smooth with sediment collected over the many 100’s of years since this was geologically active. This is the land of echinoderms. In retrospect not so atypical for the deep sea or our dive sites so far, but I am amazed nonetheless by their tremendous densities. We saw our first barnacles today. Attached to rocks with their goose-like necks, from the distance their numbers suggest meadows of wildflowers. Yellow, white, orange, and pink corals hung on the caldera rim strategically placing their polyps off the bottom into better currents for feeding. We saw a massive 14-armed seastar nearly one meter across perched on volcanic rubble. My first gastropod of the trip was a highlight and, after the many kilometers of seafloor we have traversed, a welcome friend. Well… a welcome friend you remove from their natural habitat, cage, transport through the most extreme conditions, and then place in a jar with alcohol. The other Dr. M. hauled in echinoderms disparate in color, function, and form with many potentially new to science. Today’s dive reminded me both of the wonder of the deep and the creator’s inordinate fondness for invertebrates.

President Felipe Calderón announced the creation of three new marine protected areas including Mexico’s first deep sea marine protected area, the Guaymas Basin and Eastern Pacific Rise Hydrothermal Vents Sanctuary, protecting 360,000 acres of deep-sea habitats.

[googlemap lat="-20.9" lng="-176" width="500px" height="300px" zoom="3" type="G_SATELLITE_MAP"]Eastern Lau Spreading Centre[/googlemap]Dr. M was kind enough to mention and congratulate me on my first publication several months back. I just had two more papers published in the time since then! I always meant to give the back story on it but hadn’t the time while I madly finished writing my Masters degree. I’ve finished and got all my signatures on August 3rd! I’ll write about the other 2 papers shortly, but for now I’d like to take a little time to tell you all a little tale of a little shrimp from a little hydrothermal vent in a big ocean.

You see kids, once upon a time I got to go on research cruises. Those were glorious days when I sailed out from exotic ports, drank the local flavors, backpacked around Fiji, and jammed up with the acoustic on the top deck The thrill of discovering something new always enticed me and I especially paid close attention to the critters that were brought up. Years of observation and identification have indeed twisted my mind so much that I dream about species and think constantly about characters. I go about my daily routine as if it were being read from a dichotomous key.

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A mysterious plume, possibly a stream of ice-covered methane bubbles (inset arrow), rises about 1.4 kilometers from the seafloor off the coast of California. The plume originates in a previously unknown, amphitheater-shaped scar (main image, arrow) on the ocean bottom about 32 kilometers northwest of California’s Cape Mendocino.

A recent oceanographic survey on the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer led by James V. Gardner, a marine geologist at the University of New Hampshire, discovered a 1400 meter tall plume (4.3 Eiffel Towers) rising from the seafloor off California.  The plume may have originated with a recent massive landslide that created the 3.6km “amphitheater-shaped” scar.

Water samples above the plume did not have high mineral contents, suggesting the feature is not a hydrothermal vent.  Gardner reports his teams findings in Eos, a weekly newspaper from the American Geophysical Union for members (can someone send this to me?).  The team thinks the plume is a methane gas bubbles coated in a veneer of methane hydrate ice, that quickly dissolve in warmer lower pressure water.

[googlemap lat="39.7240885773337" lng="-125.35400390625" width="500px" height="500px" zoom="6" type="G_SATELLITE_MAP"]39.724089,-125.354004[/googlemap]

My colleague and officemate, the Southern Fried Scientist, posted way back in March about his homebrew South Su Porter. South Su is a hydrothermal vent field in the western Pacific. According to SFS:

“South Su Porter, designed to recreate the feeling of seeing a deep-sea hydrothermal vent. It’s a cold, smooth, dark porter, an extra clarifying stage takes away some of the bitter and replaces it with the cold clarity of deep ocean water.

I go crisp, with a two stage fermentation before bottling, in a dark room kept at 68 F to make this porter as dark as possible.

But a cold, dark porter does not a deep-sea hydrothermal vent make. For that, we need heat…”

You’ll have to click on the link above to see the special ingredient that replicates the heat of a hydrothermal vent in his homebrew! Also in case you somehow missed read about how to brew beer in a coffee maker using only materials commonly found on a modestly sized oceanographic research vessel.

Don’t forget to get your submissions in to the Circus of the Spineless, hosted by Southern Fried Science this month. Get them in by July 30th to be included!

[googlemap lat="-37.5" lng="-110.5" width="500px" height="300px" zoom="3" type="G_HYBRID_MAP"]Pacific-Antarctic Ridge[/googlemap]

Vent crabs live in the dark depths of the ocean. Previous studies have shown that the vent crab Bythograea thermydron has a reproductive cycle synchronized with Spring and Summer phytoplankton blooms 2.5 km above the East Pacific Rise. It was hypothesized that female crabs moved away from the toxic vents, once impregnated, to raise their young. In studies of other hydrothermal vent organisms it was found that reproductive patterns were phylogenetically constrained. McKitrick (1993) defines a phylogenetic constraint as:

“any result or component of the phylogenetic history of a lineage that prevents an anticipated course of evolution in that lineage.”

In other words, an organism is limited by the abilities, morphology, genes, etc. of its last common ancestor, which is limited by the ancestor of that one, and so on through the lineage. The descendants of that organism are likewise constrained by material present in it. Novel adaptations cannot arise spontaneously. By this theory, it should stand that vent crabs related to the more well-studied Bythograea thermydron should have similar developmental processes and reproductive patterns.

Bythograea thermydron from the East Pacific Rise. Photo from University of Delware Photos.

Ana Hilário and colleagues studied two Bythograea crab species, B. laubieri and B. vrijenhoeki, from the southern portion of the East Pacific Rise and the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. The found that reproductive the developmental stages, gonadal morphology and microstructure are very similar to B. thermydron. When looking at measurements of the unfertilized egg cells across several females they discovered that the populations of the other two crabs were not synchronous in the development of the oocyte. Vitellogenisis is that development of the yolk as the egg matures. Hilário and colleagues individuals that were previtellogenic, vitellogenic or fully mature in their samples. This is in contrast with B. thermydron, where the population will develop eggs together as they await their phytoplankton bloom mana from above. These three species of crab are similar in morphology and size, therefore that cannot be a confounding factor in oocyte measurement.

This raises the question of whether seasonal reproduction is a phylogenetically constrained trait, as shown in other studies. It was long thought that the deep sea was cut off from the surface, or that the processes happening at the surface did not significantly impact the deep sea. As Jon Copley mentioned in yesterday’s fabulous guest post, food is scarce in the deep sea and hydrothermal vents are highly productive environments. But if female crabs need to move away from the influence of the vents to protect their offspring, they are missing out on the ventaliscious yummies! Major bummer huh? Maybe that is why B. thermydron in the north reproduces in synchrony with phytoplankton blooms a mile and half above it. When that phytoplankton falls down, it is raining food that can supplement gravid females. But I do not think it is known if females bulk up on vent meat before they mate and head to the outskirts of town.

B. thermydron is lucky in that it is situated under a productive gyre which concentrates the phytoplankton. The two more southern crab species are not so lucky. They are located under an oligotrophic gyre, meaning that the nutrients do not make it to the surface waters and cannot support large seasonal phytoplankton blooms. So it is unclear whether these bythograeids experience any seasonal cues whatsoever. This explains the lack of synchrony in their gametogenic development. It would be interesting to see if these crabs could be able to synchronize gametogensis in the presence of a seasonally stable food supply versus an unlimited food supply through a laboratory experiment. Additonally, whether synchrony breaks down in B. thermydron in the face of an unlimited food supply. It seems to me that paper is evidence against phylogenetically constrained traits that are ecological in nature.
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Hilário, A., Vilar, S., Cunha, M., & Tyler, P. (2009). Reproductive aspects of two bythograeid crab species from hydrothermal vents in the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge Marine Ecology Progress Series, 378, 153-160 DOI: 10.3354/meps07858

McKitrick, M. (1993). Phylogenetic Constraint in Evolutionary Theory: Has It Any Explanatory Power? Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 24 (1), 307-330 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.es.24.110193.001515

Post by Jon Copley. Dr. Jon Copley is a lecturer in marine ecology at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK. He is also director of SciConnect Limited, a company providing training in science communication and media skills. Jon is an avid deep sea explorer and studies the reproductive ecology of deep sea invertebrates, especially those from methane seeps and hydrothermal vents.

James Cameron's Aliens of the Deep: "The search for life beyond begins below."

At one point in the spectacular IMAX documentary “Aliens of the Deep”, director James Cameron says of life at hydrothermal vents: “That party’s been going on down there in the dark for the past billion years… the Sun could go out tomorrow, and they wouldn’t know, and they wouldn’t care.”

He is referring, of course, to the fact that food chains at hydrothermal vents are ultimately based on chemosynthesis – the production of organic matter by microbes using chemical energy – rather than photosynthesis by plants.

This chemical dependence would seem to grant life at vents independence from the sunlit world above, at least on ecological timescales (although on longer timescales, most vent animals still require oxygen that comes from photosynthesis in surface waters).

But if life at vents is divorced from the sunlit world above, why do some vent species follow seasonal cycles in their sex lives?  Shouldn’t the passage of our tilted planet around its star be completely irrelevant to life in these chemically-powered islands on the ocean floor?

Figuring out why some species reproduce seasonally at hydrothermal vents, and in other chemosynthetic environments such as cold seeps, may tell us what lies behind deep-sea reproductive patterns in general.

Biologists have known for a couple of decades that some “normal” deep-sea species reproduce seasonally. But away from vents and seeps, there are two possible explanations that are seemingly inseparable.

The first is food availability.  Food is usually scarce in the deep sea. But if an animal lives beneath an area where there are seasonal blooms of plankton in surface waters, it may receive a seasonal peak in organic matter sinking to the seafloor.  This seasonal manna from above could fuel seasonal reproduction.

But there is another possibility. Rather than being an ecological – or “proximal” – response to variation in energy available to adult animals, seasonal reproduction in the deep ocean may have an evolutionary – or “ultimate” – cause.
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Kevin described a new species today. What have you done?

KZ is now among the scientifically published. Occurring this week in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington is “A new species of Alvinocaris (Crustacea: Decapoda: Caridea: Alvinocarididae) from hydrothermal vents at the Lau Basin, southwest Pacific, and a key to the species of Alvinocarididae“, Kevin’s very first published paper!  I might add here that I am rather impressed that his first paper also happens to be description of a new species.  This new species is not just some uncharismatic, minute, amorphous organisms live in the muck of the seafloor…like the ones I study.  No ladies and gentlemen this is a real contender for charismatic megafauna.  Zelnio and Hourez describe an new species of Alvinocaris, an abundant an important shrimp globally at hydrothermal vents.  A. komaii is bigger and more probably more bad ass than all the other Alvinocarids.  Of course bad ass is hard to quantify, you just know it when you see it, and there are much better defining features, notches and spinules, but KZ can tell you all about that.  But Zelnio and Hourdez don’t stop there with a description of new species.  Oh no boys and girls, you also get a a pratcial guide to to all the species in the family with localities.  But now for a limited time, they are also offering a molecular phylogeny of the group.

Seriously though, your first published scientific article is a thing of pride and a very special time.  Raise your glasses…and drop a line here congratulating Kevin.