The bottom of the Arctic Ocean, below the permanent sea ice, is not a friendly place for life.
Down there in the cold dark, nutrients and vegetation are sparse; it's expected that any life that does manage to eke out an existence under these conditions would be likewise thin on the ground.Scientists were very surprised to discover, therefore, a thriving and dense population of sponges occupying inactive volcanic seamounts at mesopelagic depths in the Central Arctic Ocean.
At Langseth Ridge, however, there doesn't seem to be much to exploit. Obviously some sleuthing was in order. A team of researchers set about conducting under-ice seafloor mapping and biomass sampling, to both identify the sponge species and figure out what they were eating.
The majority of the sponges in the Langseth Ridge garden are what are known as bacteriosponges, where a significant percentage of the microbial population consists of bacteria., with an average age of about 300 years . And it turned out that the bacteria that inhabit these sponges are the key to their strange diet.
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