Our first dive went to Snail Vent and then we went to the newly discovered Urashima site,
and we went there because there’s a number of spots with iron mats.
Snail Vent gets its name from the big, hairy snails that are there.
They can get really quite big…about that big. And they have endosymbiotic bacteria in their gills.
We saw a crab fight where this big one was diving after a smaller one.
They are pretty aggressive.
They are essentially predators in the system. They’re kind of the top predator. They seem to go after anything.
Often, I find what I love to do with the camera is look really closely at what the animals are doing.
So we have a mixed community here, definitely, of sulfur oxidizers and iron oxidizers.
These mats are very heterogeneous.
That’s one of the main reasons why we’ve moved to this fine-scale sampling with the Bio-Mat Sampler,
so that we can try to get in, to get at each of those different kinds, where we didn’t have, ten years ago, we didn’t have that capability.