Mid-Atlantic Ridge Survey Finds Potential New Species
Shelley Dawicki
Northeast Fisheries Science Center
August, 18 2009 — The deep sea continues to be a treasure trove of discovery for NOAA scientists.
An international scientific team headed by NOAA’s Mike Vecchione of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center recently surveyed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, halfway between Iceland and the Azores, and may have found new life forms as well as more clues to understanding deep-sea food webs.
NOAA Teacher at Sea Ruth Meadows of Opelika Middle School in Opelika, Ala. (left), Randy Singer of the Georgia Museum of Natural History (center), and graduate student Tom Letessier (right) sort a mid-water trawl sample aboard the NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow as part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge Ecosystem (MAR-ECO) project. Photo credit: Mike Vecchione, NOAA NEFSC.
“The mid-ocean ridge system is a huge and largely unexplored feature of the Earth,” said Vecchione. “A major focus of this Mid-Atlantic Ridge Ecosystem project (MAR-ECO) cruise was the bathypelagic zone [where organisms can be found at midwater depths from 3,280 to 13,123 feet]. Although it comprises the majority of Earth's living space, there have been very few studies of the animals that live there. MAR-ECO is the only Census of Marine Life project studying the bathypelagic nekton — the swimming animals like fishes, shrimps and squids.”
MAR-ECO is a 16-nation effort to determine if the underwater mountain chain in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean has its own distinct animal communities. MAR-ECO is an initiative of the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year global study of the abundance, distribution, and diversity of marine life in the world’s oceans.
“We caught many unique specimens, including some that may prove to be new species after detailed follow-up studies ashore,” said Vecchione, a specialist in deep-sea squids and octopods, who also serves as director of the NOAA Fisheries Service’s National Systematics Laboratory at the Smithsonian Institution. “We also collected a lot of samples for studies about food-web relationships, age growth and maturity, and genetic relationships with similar organisms in other parts of the north Atlantic.”
The follow-up studies to confirm the discovery of any new species are expected to take months or possibly years to complete.
The researchers, who included NOAA “Teacher at Sea” Ruth Meadows from Opelika Middle School in Opelika, Ala., spent five weeks in June and July aboard the 208-foot NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow working on MAR-ECO.
Much of the expedition focused on the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone, around 52 degrees north latitude, where water depths range from 1,600 to almost 15,000 feet. The terrain is very rugged, making it a challenging environment for sampling and data collection.
Rough weather hampered operations at times, but Vecchione said the cruise was a great success.
“A preliminary impression from our midwater tows is that animals normally thought of as living very deep in the water column seem to be living above the ridge and closer to the surface than expected,” said Vecchione. “Additionally, some species that were thought to live in the open water column seem to be associated with the bottom in the ridge area. Given the overall size of the global mid-ocean ridge system, if these patterns are correct, they have important implications for general oceanic ecology.”
John Galbraith of the NOAA Fisheries laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., holds a deep-sea slickhead fish. A large trawl net, like that on the NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow, is needed to collect the large, active animals in the deep-sea mid-ocean ridge environment. Photo credit: With permission from Amy Heger, independent researcher.
A spiny deep-sea king crab of the species Neolithodes collected during a recent MAR-ECO research cruise. Photo credit: Mike Vecchione, NOAA NEFSC.
The third specimen ever collected of Promachoteuthis sloani, a very rare deep-sea squid. The species was described by NOAA's Mike Vecchione and MAR-ECO colleagues Richard Young and Uwe Piatkowski based on a specimen collected on the 2004 Norwegian MAR-ECO cruise and another in the Smithsonian Institution's collection. It is named after the Sloan Foundation, a supporter of the Census of Marine Life. Photo credit: Mike Vecchione, NOAA NEFSC.
A deep-sea angler fish caught during the MAR-ECO cruise. Its sharp teeth are angled inward to prevent prey from escaping after being attracted by the brightly-colored lure dangling above the fish's mouth. Photo credit: With permission from David Shale, freelance photographer.