<
https://theconversation.com/five-arms-no-heart-and-a-global-family-what-dna-revealed-about-the-weird-deep-sea-world-of-brittle-stars-261566>
"You may have read that the deep sea is a very different environment from the
land and shallow water. There is no light, it is very cold, and the pressure of
all the water above is immense.
Plants can’t grow there, and the energy powering life mostly comes from organic
matter sinking from the sunlit surface. These facts have been known for more
than 150 years.
But I want to tell you something you probably don’t know about the deep sea:
for animals on the seafloor, it is a very connected environment. There are few
environmental barriers to stop animals slowly expanding their distribution to
cover thousands of kilometres. Over a million years, deep-sea animals can
spread from Iceland to Tasmania.
In a new study published today in
Nature, we map the distribution and
relatedness of a single group of marine animals across all ocean seafloors,
from the coast down to the abyssal plains of the deep sea, from the equator to
the pole."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
