A giant red crab cemetery at the bottom of the ocean baffles researchers and raises environmental questions.
It’s no secret that millions of dead crabs wash up on the world’s coastlines each year, but this spectacle surpasses all of its predecessors – scientists have discovered a giant mass grave of red crabs at a depth of 4000 meters. Hakai Magazine says they don’t belong here.
This unexpected discovery was made in 2015, the year scientists explored the Clarion-Clipperton Pacific Seabed Conservation Zone (CCZ), known for its high concentration of polymetallic nodules of great interest to deep-sea miners.
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However, the researchers stumbled upon a gruesome sight – under the water column at a depth of 4000 meters, there was a one-in-a-million mass grave of red crab.
The unexpected discovery of a mass grave of red crabs 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface baffles scientists and raises questions about deep-sea ecology. Such a large number of dead crabs is shocking in principle, but finding them in the abyss where they never belonged surprised scientists.
Eric Simon-Lledo, a marine biologist at the UK’s National Oceanographic Centre, said it took him several days to realize that he and his colleagues had seen a graveyard of pelagic crab. This confused scientists a bit, as none had ever heard of such a massive sedimentation of the cliff before.
Red crabs have been known to grow in the eastern Pacific, causing them to scavenge en masse along the coasts of California, Baja California, and Mexico. However, it is rather unexpected to find them in such large numbers and at such depth.
The researchers note that it seems even more odd that the mass grave was found 1.5 kilometers off the coast, which is extremely far from crab spawning grounds in the northwest United States. Scientists believe it will take at least a year for the current to push the crabs into this abyss. It has become a mass grave for them.
Another confusing factor, Simon-Lledo says, is that so many red crabs drifting around must attract the attention of hungry hunters and scavengers, but the crabs on the cliff appear relatively untouched.
Scientists suggest that the cause of this crab swarm could be several factors – algal blooms or various climatic events. What’s more, the researchers can’t say with certainty whether such a massive drop in crabs occurred once or occasionally, and they just went undetected up to this point.
The researchers calculated that this single event was 1.5 times the carbon flux that the region typically receives throughout the year, and they concluded. As a result, excess carbon must enter the food chain, thereby protecting its richer ecosystem.
As a result, the scientists concluded that deep-sea mining in this area can cause enormous damage to the ecosystem. Note that there is currently no mining in the area where the scientists discovered the crab cemetery, but this area still remains a “pregnancy” for underwater miners.
Previously Focus He wrote that a giant shark graveyard has been discovered at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Source: Focus
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