![]() Credit: SMARTEX Project, Natural Environment Research Council, UK () A 20cm long sea cucumber of the genus Deima found in the CCZ. ![]() Credit: SMARTEX Project, Natural Environment Research Council, UK () A 35cm wide sea star of found in the CCZ of the genus Dytaster. The side and underside of a 17cm long sea cucumber Psychropotes longicauda found in the CCZ. The ISA is due to finalise its international regulations for deep seabed mining in July this year. “Some nodules have close to nothing, or were actually barren, but they would have still had some bacteria or some tiny animals.” “You get the odd nodule with a really big animal growing on it, and literally every single nodule has little animals on it. “The nodules are a really interesting question… from a biological perspective, it’s incredibly interesting because every single nodule looks different: they have particular kinds of sizes of shapes, and it would be really interesting to see how they’re colonised. There’s really deep basal level diversity in the sea, a huge amount of adaptation to these pressures and this depth, and lack of light,” Rabone says. Maintaining undisturbed lives until the advent of deep-sea exploration in the 1800s, the species and ecosystems that have since been discovered in the world’s deep-sea regions are important candidates for further study, which may be compromised by mining. Credit: SMARTEX Project, Natural Environment Research Council, UK The underside of a seastar from the genus Hymenaster showing its oral cavity. These species were among more than 100,000 individual records analysed from research surveys in the CCZ, collected using remote-control vehicles or sturdy boxes to scoop the creatures from the seafloor. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is under pressure to allow deep seafloor mining in international waters when it meets in July.īut now, a British and European team has, for the first time, published a checklist of 5,142 new species: around a quarter are arthropods (which include crustaceans), and a third are worm species.Įchinoderms like starfish, sea urchins and cucumbers, and coral species were also described. ![]() ![]() One hotspot for deep-sea mining is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) – six million square kilometres of ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, which has been identified as a site of polymetallic nodules containing a range of important elements like cobalt and nickel. About 5,000 new species – and likely more – have been discovered living off the coast of Mexico, potentially raising concerns for a deep-sea mining industry looking to extract metal-rich materials from the ocean floor. ![]()
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