The star of deep mining to discovery of a new species

Researchers have discovered high levels of biodiversity in deep-sea plains in the Eastern Pacific Ocean—an area that’s already been divvied up by mining companies for commercial exploration. The study, published today (October 17) in Current Biology, describes several new taxa of brittle stars, relatives of sea stars, and warns that industrial exploitation of the region could lead to serious declines in these and many other poorly documented species.

Such biological surveys are “of huge importance,” says Thomas Dahlgren, a marine scientist at the University of Gothenburg who wasn’t involved in the study. The sort of deep-sea plains the team studied cover about 45 percent of the Earth’s surface, he says, but “we know almost nothing about who lives there.” The work, led by Magdalini Christodoulou of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany and Tim O’Hara of Museums Victoria in Australia, focused principally on an area known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a deep-sea region between Hawaii and Mexico that has attracted interest from mining companies for its deposits of commercially valuable metals such as manganese, nickel, and cobalt.

Researchers collected hundreds of specimens of brittle stars (class Ophiuroidea) from the area over the course of several expeditions and then used DNA sequencing to sort the animals into taxa and analyze their evolutionary relationships. Preliminary findings revealed “unprecedented” ophiuroid diversity, the team writes in its paper, including three previously unknown lineages that are more than 70 million years old.

The DNA data also showed that many species are phylogenetically distinct from fauna in the surrounding regions, meaning that they’re not, as some researchers had proposed, simply drifting in from populations based in other habitats, notes Sabine Stöhr, a brittle star biologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History who wasn’t involved in the work. “They evolved there,” she says. “They didn’t evolve on shallower slopes or on seamounts and migrate down.

Source :

Yong, E. (2019). The Atlantic. Retrieved from A Hidden World of Strage Starfish like Creature in the Abyss: theatlantic.com/science/a-hidden-wolrd-of-strage-starfishlike-creatures-in-the-abyss/