Beyond sunlight: Explorers census 17650 ocean species between edge of darkness ...
Census of Seagoing Life scientists have inventoried an astonishing glut, diversity and distribution of deep sea species that have never known sunlight - creatures that somehow rule over a living in a frigid black world down to 5,000 meters (~3 miles) below the loads waves. Revealed via deep-towed cameras, sonar and other vanguard technologies, animals known to boom in an eternal watery darkness now number 17,650, a different collection of species ranging from crabs to shrimp to worms. Most have adapted to diets based on meager droppings from the sunlit layer above, others to diets of bacteria that come apart down oil, sulfur and methane, the sunken bones of out whales and other implausible foods.
Five of the Census' 14 pasture projects plumb the ocean beyond light, each dedicated to the look at of life in progressively deeper realms - from the continental margins (COMARGE: Continental Margins Ecosystems) to the quill-like ridge running down the mid-Atlantic (MAR-ECO: Mid-Atlantic Ridge Ecosystem Estimate), the submerged mountains rising from the seafloor (CenSeam: Worldwide Census of Marine Life on Seamounts), the blurred floor of ocean plains (CeDAMar: Census of Dissimilarity of Abyssal Marine Life), and the vents, seeps, whale falls and chemically-driven ecosystems found on the margins of mid-gobs ridges and in the deepest ocean trenches (ChEss: Biogeography of Sage-Water Chemosynthetic Systems).
