Vast areas of the deep Pacific are targeted for seafloor mining. Yes these
are some of the most poorly explored habitats on the planet. The life of the
abyssal seafloor, depths of 5,000 meters are about three miles, is weird and
wonderful there are animals with novel adaptations, sailing sea cucumbers,
predacious sponges. Yet most of these species have never been collected and are
new to science. One of our main project goals is to explore the biodiversity of
this region to understand how these they will be impacted by mining activities
and in particular to assess how areas set aside from mining protected from
mining our adequate to preserve the biodiversity of this vast region.
Why do people care about mining in the deep seafloor, well it's covered in some areas
with black potato sized structures that are full of valuable minerals, nickel,
copper, cobalt, rare earth elements that we need to make cell phones and the
supplies of the minerals in these nodules are enormous a world's supply
for many decades of many of these essential metals.
One important element of this project is to evaluate the extent to which
communities on seamounts or at shallower depths in within each no mining zone can
serve as sources of larvae to recolonize communities on the abyssal plain and so
that's one of the important routes for re-establishment of these communities
after after mining and so one aspect we've been doing is sampling larvae and
also looking at connectivity and species overlap between communities these
distinct habitats. At depths of 4,000 to 5,000 meters or about 2 to 3 miles the
deep ocean is extremely difficult to sample it's a very remote habitat we're
using a variety of state-of-the-art techniques such as benthic landers and
remotely operated vehicles.
A real technological workhorse of our project is the remotely operated vehicle
Lulu Kai this goes descends to the bottom of the ocean with video cameras
and manipulators and collects the animals that we need to study as well as
the sediment samples that contain the diverse microbes.
Among the most numerous and diverse inhabitants of the deep sea are
microorganisms yet they're chronically difficult to study the approach that we
are taking for this project is to study their genetic blueprint in order to
better understand some of the ways that they obtain energy and recycled material
in the deep sea.
The remotely operated vehicle is a marvelous tool because it allows you to
target individual organisms slurp them up into a chamber undamaged or pick up
sea cucumbers very gently with its manipulator and drop it into a box. We're
able to collect all kinds of animals that have never been collected before in
this part of the ocean.
Although we're sampling microbes and taking lots of animal samples
to look at what is there what species are there we're also trying
to ask questions about what are the animals and the microbes actually doing
in the sediments and for this we're using seafloor landers, benthic chamber
landers and also what are called micro profiling Landers and these allow us to
measure respiration rates see how much the animals and the microbes are
breathing at the sea floor and also allow us to track how much food they
process at the sea floor that we can then compare to other areas and build up
an idea of how their ecosystem is functioning. Baited cameras are a very
useful tool to sample the mobile top predators in in these ecosystems so here
we have one of the most common animals in the deep sea a rat tail fish that
have long tapering tails that some early scientists thought looked
like a rat's tail. At the seamounts we found swarms of eels a species that were
not sure of just yet these are animals that are akin to lions and cheetahs on
the plains of Africa but because these these animals such as rat tails and eels
because they're so mobile oftentimes they avoid the ROV so the baited camera
system gives us a tool to attract them right in front both of our instruments
to census them.
so often with the natural resource management we end up chasing our tail
the activity starts and then we come up with a plan for how to manage it and how
to conserve the resource this has happened with fisheries that's happened
with mining on land and it's very unusual here because these reserves have
been set up before the deep-sea mining has begun. So we hope through our
research to evaluate whether these reserves are adequate preservation areas
for the region