Nearly two miles below the ocean’s surface, we are building new worlds. You might be surprised that these ecospheres are wooden—little log cabins hosting a cornucopia of sea life.  By controlling the size of these wooden homes, we can begin to answer fundamental questions about how the oceans will adapt to climate change. In our most recent, paper we are beginning to grasp the extent that food controls biodiversity, biological novelty, and the competition among species.

On the seafloor, chunks of wood—we call them wood falls—play host to a variety of invertebrate species often not found anywhere else in the ocean.  These species live their entire lives on waterlogged timber; settling out of the water column as larvae to consume wood, or to prey upon other species that do.  Once on a wood fall, these organisms can never leave, their dispersal limited to the beginning of their lives as plankton. And for all of these reasons, the island communities created by wood falls serve as the perfect experiment.

Because of humans, the oceans are radically changing.  They’re becoming warmer, more acidic, and less oxygenated.  But an even more disturbing trend has been uncovered; the oceans may be becoming less productive, providing less food and carbon for its denizens.  Scientists do not really have a handle on how life in the oceans will react to this finding. What will happen to individual species and whole communities of species?  This is an intractable question in many ways because it is hard to test. We cannot easily experimentally adjust how much food a swath of ocean gets. Or can we? In a wood-fall experiment we can change the amount of food the community receives by simply adjusting the size of the log. These species cannot leave to look for better meals once they arrive.  They are wholly dependent on the log we’ve provided in an otherwise barren patch of the deep ocean floor.

In 2006, Jim Barry (MBARI) and I placed 16 logs with a remote operated vehicle (ROV) over 2 miles down on the deep-sea floor off the California coast. We left them there for five years and then remotely and robotically harvested them.  After sorting, identifying, and analyzing, these wood falls are revealing yet another fundamental insight.

How does more food, or more specifically more carbon, allow for more species?  To explain the science, let’s visit a donut shop. At this donut shop, there are three types of donuts: chocolate, plain glazed, and raspberry filled. I ask the donut maker to make three new donuts and provide extra ingredients for them to do so.  

In Scenario A, the donut maker produces chocolate, plain glazed, and raspberry filled along with a dark chocolate, a plain glazed with sprinkles, and a blueberry filled.  The donut shop is still just serving three basic types of donuts: chocolate, plain glazed, and fruit filled. These new donuts are just slight deviations. We will call this Scenario A donut packing.  The donut maker is just packing the menu with variants of the original donuts.

Much like donuts in a shop, we can think of species in a community the same way.  As food increases and the number of species increase, are we getting slight deviations (donut packing) or something truly novel (donut expansion)?  In the ecological sense, are niches, i.e. the full set of characteristics that describe a species and their requirements, being packed into the community or are we expanding the overall niche diversity.

And so for our wood-fall species, we put numbers to each of their niches describing their feeding habits, how well and even if they move, as well as their preference for space on the wood fall. We found that as you increase the wood-fall size, and the amount of wood, you do not get truly novel species, rather you pack these species into the community.  They are just slight deviations. This suggest that increased food reduces competition among animals allowing them to coexist peacefully. Species do not have to be completely novel to join the community.

In the end this means that decreases of productivity in the oceans, will limit diversity by not allowing species to coexist.  Species will be vying for the same spots and in the end many may lose.

McClain, C.R., C.L. Nunnally, A. Chapman, and J. Barry. (2018) Energetic Increases Lead to Niche Packing in Deep-Sea Wood Falls. Biology Letters 

The post Wooden Homes on the Seafloor Yield Insights Into the Impacts of Climate Change first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Sub-Neritic Gentrification

For November we will be doing some deep thinking about deep-sea mollusks in an attempt to understand the complex history and adaptations of these animals living in the depths of our oceans. Biodiversity of today’s marine snails can be traced to several different ecological and environmental phenomena, but in the Deep-Water Helmet Shell Galeodea keyteri, it is likely a case of adaptive radiation exploring new realms. The Helmet Shells (Cassidae) are a speciose group of large, shallow-water tropical and temperate marine snails that range among the intertidal coral rubble and sand flats to offshore muds, but as this evolutionarily successful group of gastropods continued to diversity into different niches, several species moved into deep-water to establish new ways of living. At these depths staying alive presents serious challenges with an extremely cold, low oxygen, nutrient-poor, and high-pressure environment, so some deep-water species trended to smaller, slow-growing physiologies like as a way to successfully conserve energy and resources. Since the dark depths lack sunlight needed for algae to grow, most species of deep-sea mollusks are either scavengers or predators, with little resources for vegetarians to survive. Like all Helmet Shells, Galeodea keyteri is a carnivore, specializing on starfish, brittle stars, and urchins. Catching their slow-moving prey with a muscular foot, glands in the proboscis secrete a fluid rich in acids that dissolve the echinoderm’s calcium-carbonate skeletons, while a radula drills into the weakened parts of the body to extract nutrients from their internal organs. A tough environment requires innovative strategies and hardy adaptations for a species to survive. Ain’t natural selection grand?

Molluscan Methuselah

While some species of deepwater mollusks are derived from shallow-water taxa that extended into and adapted within deep ocean ecosystems, other taxa of marine mollusks are taxonomic geezers with a much longer history. The Slit Snails (Pleuorotomariidae) are perhaps the oldest still-living lineage of marine snails, extending back in the fossil record more than 500 million years. Named because of its long slit at the aperture allowing for extension of their respiratory siphon, they were abundant in the shallow reefs throughout the world. Between the Late Cretaceous (ca. 90 million years ago) and the middle Eocene (ca. 40 million years ago) is when most modern lineages of shallow-water reef-living gastropods originated and diversified, and also the time when slit shells seem to disappear from that same fossil record. Among paleontologists and malacologists, the general hypothesis is that these modern taxa somehow out-competed the slit shells for food, or perhaps were more adapted to changing marine climates or fluctuating sea levels of the time, forcing the slit shells into progressively deeper and deeper water. This type of ecological displacement and bathymetric submergence has been seen in many other deep-sea groups, including corals, crinoids, brachiopods, and fishes. Today, slit shells are found in depths exceeding 3,000 meters, living the hi-life eating sponges in a cold, dark, lonely, nutrient-poor world.

Die-Hardest

As far as the origins of deep-sea gastropods go, we’ve visited two scenarios: new lineages of shallow-water snails radiating into deeper waters, and those formerly shallow-water taxa that have been out-competed in the shallows and forced into deeper, less productive habitats. But there’s a third group of deep-water snails that are so tough, so extreme that they can live in shallow and deep water. Here is the Checkered Hairsnail (Trichotropis cancellaria; Capulidae), the James Bond, the Bruce Willis, and the Rock all coiled up into one extreme snail that ranges from the intertidal zone to depths of nearly 2,000 ft. (600m). Is it true grit or it’s hard-boiled soul that make it impervious to the relentless cold, pressure, and darkness of the deep sea? Their broad range is more likely the result of two things: (1) a wide and variable physiology that can tolerate the extremes of shallow to deep; and (2) its broad diet that it can obtain at any depth. You see, the Checkered Hairsnail is a suspension-feeder, meaning it feeds on the decomposing bits of animal debris suspended in the water, which it traps by sticky mucous, and that kind of detritus is found in all habitats. However, it’s a sneaky critter. When the floating slurry of decomposition becomes scarce, they will parasitize tube worms by inserting their proboscis down the mouth of the worm and pumping out the contents of the worm’s stomach. Evolution: the weirder the better.

Slo-Mo Snail
Shallow-water gastropods live the good life. Warm water, a sunny sea rich in oxygen, and plenty of food provides them the metabolism to live fast, grow big, and die young, relatively speaking, of course. The flipside in the deep sea is a life of constant near-freezing cold, little available food, and water suffocatingly sparse in oxygen. This shell of the Catalina Turrid (Antiplanes catalinae, Pseudomelatomidae) who lives at depths of up to 4800 ft (1460 m), tells its story of life in this harsh realm. Growth lines, which indicate the increase and cessation of shell development, are seen as wide bands often far apart in curving spire of fast-growing shallow-water shells. In this species, the growth lines are close and compact, showing very slow growth and likely a long life. Their low metabolism provides little extra energy for their minimal growth and reproduction, so these snails probably take the developmental route of the tortoise over the hare. This shell tells another and more concerning story. Once only collected during deep-ocean trawls by research vessels, this species was prized by collectors as a rarity and an oddity. With commercial fisheries abandoning over-exploited fishing grounds along the shallower coasts, fishing has gone into the deep ocean to tap into those fragile resources. This specimen was taken as unintentional bycatch by a deep-water shrimp trawler, and though it wasn’t the target of the fisheries, the sparse populations of these slow-growing snails cannot sustain even the modest impact by commercial fisheries

Post-Docs Please Enquire

The curse of working with deep-sea gastropods is how few specimens are in museum collections, and what very little is known about them. That too is the siren’s call of opportunity in deep-sea malacological research. The Japanese Pagoda Shell (Columbarium pagoda, Turridae) has been known to science for close to 200 years, based on relatively few well-documented specimens in museums and private collections scattered throughout the world, yet virtually nothing is known about their ecology. Diet, trophic niche, age, growth rates, reproduction, population structure, predators, parasites, physiology, ecological associations, movements – none of that has been adequately documented. If all mysteries in the ocean were solved, there would be no jobs for future under-paid post-docs or over-worked assistant professors. Those with grant funding, a modicum of workaholism, and access to deep-sea technology could pioneer new directions into a richer ecological understanding of the deep ocean’s marine mollusks. That siren’s call can just as easily dash unfeasible projects on the rocks of financial destitution and lead to deep regret of one’s research program and entrée into a life of constant self-medication and personal validation. These mysteries await the bold, but favor the wise.

The post Malacology Monthly: Going Deep first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Are you old enough to remember the show MTV Cribs, where a camera crew invades the home of a filthy-rich celebrity and takes annoyingly jumpy quick-shots of how awesomely decked-out and unnecessarily opulent their ‘crib’ is? Think about that approach, but with a Malacology Monday twist. Firing up a band-saw and with the warnings of my old school shop teacher “you’re gonna cut your thumb off” echoing in my head, our team will show you inside the ‘cribs’ of Malacology’s most interesting species.

High-Rise House
First up, the aptly-named Screw Turritella (Turritella terebra: Turritellidae) with a tall, twisting spire. For gastropods, the shell is a home that offers protection to withdraw into when needed, and as the muscled-mass of the snail grows, so too must the shell. The opening – or aperture – of the shell is the front-door, and new shell material is excreted by the fleshy mantle around the edge of this opening. As the door gets bigger, the shell wraps around itself as a twisted, ever-widening tube. What you see in the cross section is a ‘crib’ that starts off tiny when the snail is just a wee one, and gets larger with age. While not ostentatious enough to make it on MTV, it’s still a cozy and versatile home.

Cute as a Button
A peek inside the Commercial Topshell (Tectus niloticus, Trochidae) shows a low, tightly-twisting whorl, making the whole shell as a compact stout cone. The thick internal walls also provide strong structural support. Such a shape offers good architectural resistance from strong waves in shallow shores, and from shell-crunching fishes & crabs. From larger specimens, round shell disks are drilled to make buttons, hence the name Commercial Topshell, not that it is especially good at banking or international commerce. Since only a few buttons can be drilled from each shell, this species is heavily collected in the Indo-Pacific region where it lives, and since its meat is delicious, it has been fished-out in much of its range. Several countries are developing captive-breeding facilities to raise them commercially, and other programs employ captive hatcheries that release the young back in the wild to supplement the natural population. In many areas though, the main way to promote the population of the Commercial Topshell is to kill off their wild predators, like porcupine fishes, wrasse, bat rays, and crabs. Not such an ecologically sound approach especially since a single darned coconut can make more buttons than a dozen shells.

Home Security
Next we burst into the home of the Strawberry Conch (Strombus luhuanus: Strombidae), one of the smallest but most abundant conch species in the Indo-Pacific. Here we see the shell growing tightly around most of the body, leaving very little of the spire exposed. The aperture of the shell is very long and narrow, but since the resident snail has no internal hard parts, it can flatten its foot, head, and mantle to squeeze through that skinny opening. Such a thin front door is an adaptation against large predatory crabs, nature’s home-invasion robbers. In shells with a larger openings, crabs don’t politely knock, but hold the shell tight with one claw, and with the other, they jab it into the aperture and break the opening away. As the snail withdraws deeper into the shell, the crab just keeps turning and breaking the whorl of the shell until it reaches its prey. With the Strawberry Conch, their security system consists of this narrow opening that prevents a crab from inserting its claw in the first place, and the thickened lip around this opening provides extra strength to prevent the initial breakage of the aperture, keeping the snail safe inside

House of a Hundred Rooms
In this, our last visit through the dwellings of mollusks, we visit the palatial estate of the Chambered Nautilus (Nautilus pompilus; Nautilidae), with a grand array of ever diminishing luminous pearlescent back-rooms. As we saw during our tour through the rather Spartan dwellings of gastropods, the living chamber for the snail is a continuous tube that spirals around an axis, increasing in length and diameter as the animal grows. While the Chambered Nautilus develops in a somewhat similar way, the living chamber holds the mass of the tentacled landlord, but as the shell grows, the previous back-end of the living chamber is walled-off with a shiny layer of nacre. These rooms are connected by a spiral tube, the siphuncle (use that term in your next Scrabble match) that balances fluids, salts, and gasses, ultimately making each empty room an internal flotation device. Gastropods slowly drag their home along the sea floor like low-class campers, but the Chambered Nautilus uses blasts of water from its siphon to push the shell through the open water like a sporty, speedy, jet-powered blimp. In deeper water, the wall between each chamber strengthens the shell, preventing a disastrous implosion. Chambered Nautilus, I like your style.

The post Malacology Monthly: Inside-Out first appeared on Deep Sea News.

0:07-0:13 (1) Clathrina sp. of sponge, (2) Ceramaster sp. (cookie seastar), (3) Corallimorph anemone, and (4) a white squat lobster (Galatheidae) on the sponge

0:14-0:19 (5) White Hydroids growing on the valve wheel and (6) another squat lobster

0:20-0:25 (7) a yellow Primnoidae or Plexauridae coral (just right of 7) white corals may be a species of Corallium (example 1, example 2), (8) a spikey urchin maybe Aspidodiadema, and (9) a swimmimg cucumber probably Enypniastes.

0:26-0:32 (10) a variety of small brittle stars

0:38-0:44 (11) Primnoidae or Plexauridae coral and (12) two orange Galatheidae squat lobsters

0:48-0:52 (13) Primnoidae or Plexauridae corals, but fouled with sediment or detritus and possibly dead

The post The Animals of the Musashi Battleship first appeared on Deep Sea News.

One of the most obscure invertebrates of all of the ocean is the Entoprocta. It doesn’t take a student of Latin to understand that it’s name means “anus inside”.  Sure, it’s unfortunate, and all the well-to-do invertebrate biologist prefer the name Kamptozoa, meaning “curved animals”, but I prefer Entoprocta for the same reason I prefer American muscle cars over European sports cars, pork BBQ to filet mignon, and Stove Top Stuffing to dried cranberry whole bread stuffing.  It’s the same reason you prefer to get your marine science news from DSN instead of, well, just about anywhere else.  Sometimes less refined is just easier to relate to.

Anyway, Entoprocts don’t get a lot of attention, which is strange because if you had anus in your name I’m pretty sure people would stop and take notice. These little goblet shaped animals typically occur along a colonial network of stolons where, if they have any sense of humor at all (and I like to think they do), they spend their time giggling about their name.  At the top of the goblet is a crown of tentacles with cilia that draw particles into their patiently waiting mouths.  However, both the mouth and the anus lie inside this crown, hence the crass name.

Of the 140 species of Entoprocts  the largest zooid is less than ¼ inch tall  (7 mm) and 3 of the largest zooids would still fit on a U.S. penny. Most of these species are also commensal on worms, sponges, and other invertebrates.  It’s unclear whether their buddies also giggle about their unfortunate name.  With few exceptions, most species are found in less than 50 meters of water.  Only one species occurs deeper than 700 m.  This colonial Ectoproct was found at 4130 meters.

But, wait!

A new species has been described by Anastasia Borisanova and collaborators in Russia that beats the record by more than 1000 meters.  Loxosomella profundorum, a completely new species, was found at 5222 meters in the Kamchatka Trench in the northwest Pacific Ocean. The profundorum is Latin for “deep sea”.  The total length of this species is 4 mm putting it at the larger side for Ectoproct zooids.  Unlike its relatives,  this rare endo anal critter is solitary.  Sad, really. I have to wonder if it’s the name. The deep sea is a pretty harsh place to live.

Borisanova, A., Chernyshev, A., Neretina, T., & Stupnikova, A. (2014). Description and phylogenetic position of the first abyssal solitary kamptozoan species from the Kuril-Kamchatka trench area: Loxosomella profundorum sp. Nov. (Kamptozoa: Loxosomatidae) Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography DOI: 10.1016/j.dsr2.2014.07.016

The post A New Inside Anus Found Very Deep first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This lovely piece of art, by graduate students Laurel Hiebert and Kira Treibergs with artwork by Marley Jarvis, made the rounds last week. We are thrilled to have been given permission to post it on Deep Sea News! This design is now available as t-shirts and totebags, with proceeds to benefit the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and the new Charleston Marine Life Center. Spineless Supporters can also join their Facebook group.

Our own para_sight had a similar take on the 99%.

The post Octopi Wall Street! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

So without further ado, the 10 reasons why Molluscs are the best.

• More body size range than any other group. The biggest invertebrate? A mollusc!  And it has hooks!
• Way over 100,000 molluscs! [Insert your comment about how there are millions of arthropods here] Blah, blah, blah…they all look the same and that is some lame estimate based on beetles.
• Fear and respect the radula
• Snails with hair.  We got them! Snails with iron.  We got them!  Snails with spikes that are just plain bad ass.  We got them to!
• They will eat your wood, suck out your innards, and gnaw on your gills!
• Hermaphrodites, multiple partners, and sequential lovin’!
• Aplacophoras…I bet you didn’t even know about these? They are like crawling bristle brushes.
• Bernoulli referred to it as the miraculous spiral and others referred to it as the golden spiral for its relation to the golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers.  The logarithmic spiral possesses unique mathematical properties such that as the size of the spiral increases the shape remains unaltered. You can’t throw a Bernoulli or a Fibonacci without hitting one in the molluscs!  Where else to they occur in metazoans?  No where!
• Because of this, this, and this!
• Vampire squids from hell!  HELL!

Make sure you stay tuned here for updates as the situation develops and the #invwar hashtag on Twitter

The post Molluscs, now with 100% more awesum first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Errant polychaete from a Pacific coast kelp holdfast; filmed during an Invertebrate Zoology lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The post TGIF: Polychaete first appeared on Deep Sea News.

10.  Those barnacles just ain’t feeding!  This is red hot barnacle copulation! Turn the lights down low, everything’s goin’ to be just right…

9. Humboldt Squid are vicious, blood thirsty demons ready to rip the flesh off any living creature.  Of course I tend toward exaggeration

8. Beautiful? Definitely! Slow? Stunningly!  Hungry? Absolutely! Equipped with deadly precision and the gastropod equivalent of a harpoon, species of the genus Conus are here to terrorize all the fish in your neighborhood.

7. Sharks? Whatever… those serious about the ocean know octopods are top predators

6. Stunning, a rare thing of beauty but vicious and deadly. Reminds of a girl I dated once.

5. They’re sponges and they’re horny!

4. They’re like little puppies.

3. No top ten craziest web videos of marine invertebrates would be complete with the GIANT ISOPOD.

2. Polychaetes are one of the most diverse and bewildering marine invertebrate groups. To love the ocean is to love the worms. This is a 10cm Nereis. Make sure you watch to 0:55 for the amazing everting proboscis with its horny hooks.

1. Sure there are far more freshwater rotifers than marine but no reason to leave them off the list.

Bonus: Not invertebrate but sometimes you just gotta dance

The post The 10 Greatest Web Videos of Marine Invertebrates first appeared on Deep Sea News.

About a month ago, I published my first paper at PLoS One. I believed an open access journal was the most appropriate place for the work so the group’s findings would be accessible to the public, scientists, conservationists, and policy makers.  I am delighted to say that this work, and the major finding of connectedness between the seamount and the surrounding deep sea, in part aided in efforts to include Davidson Seamount into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

I am delighted to see this work being discussed both locally at the Monterey Herald (Scientist See Movement of Marine Species) and internationally in a piece done for Conservation Magazine, a publication for the Society for Conservation Biology (A Seamount a Dozen).

Craig R. McClain, Lonny Lundsten, Micki Ream, James Barry, Andrew DeVogelaere (2009). Endemicity, Biogeography, Composition, and Community Structure On a Northeast Pacific Seamount PLoS ONE, 4 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004141

The post Seamount Life Is Unique Just Not In the Way We Thought first appeared on Deep Sea News.