Something has been subtly altering the laws of biology 13,000 feet below the surface in an area of the Pacific seafloor that most people will never consider. Twenty-four new amphipod species have been discovered by researchers working in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a large plain of sediment between Hawaii and Mexico. Tucked away within that count is something even rarer: a completely new superfamily, a new branch grafted onto the tree of life itself. It’s the kind of discovery that seems insignificant until you realize how big of an impact it has.
Researcher Tammy Horton of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton explained it in terms that nearly everyone could understand. “It’s fairly common to find a new species,” she said. Discovering a new superfamily is quite different; in her comparison, it’s more akin to knowing that cats and bears exist on Earth and then unexpectedly learning about dogs. I’ve been thinking about that comparison ever since I read it. It’s not exaggerated. It’s just a sincere effort to make a highly technical accomplishment relatable to the rest of us.
At first glance, the creatures themselves appear unglamorous; they resemble shrimp and are only a centimeter long. What sets them apart is their peculiar conical mouth, which is designed for darkness and pressure that most of us will never encounter. However, when viewed under a laser-scanning microscope, they appear to glow strangely, in oranges and greens, in stark contrast to the black chasm they truly inhabit. The difference between how they live and how they appear once science gets its hands on them has an almost theatrical quality.
In a tale like this, it’s simple to overlook how the discovery took place. After years of working on their own collections, Horton and her collaborator, Anna Jaňděewska of the University of Münódň, discovered, almost by coincidence, that they had independently reached the same conclusions. What is typically a years-long taxonomic slog was reduced to something more akin to a sprint by combining their datasets and bringing in over a dozen additional experts for a single intense week in Poland. It’s difficult to ignore how much scientific advancement still depends on two individuals comparing notes and discovering they’ve been pursuing the same ghost.
It was more important than it might seem to give the animals names. In policy circles, a species cannot truly be discussed, protected, or even debated without a name, which Jaňděewska referred to as a sort of “passport for living”. Horton was even more direct: anything is essentially invisible to those who make decisions about its habitat until it has an official name. Pseudolepechinella apricity, one of the new species, was named after an old English word that means “warmth of winter sun.” This choice was made because it seemed to be how the workshop felt, huddled together through a Polish February.
It’s not an accident that there is a sense of urgency. Now, a regulatory change is centered on the same area of the ocean. NOAA finalized changes in January that allow businesses to apply for commercial mining permits in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in addition to exploration licenses, instead of after years of previous research. Officials described this change as updating out-of-date legislation. Manganese nodules, the type of battery-grade metal deposits that are desired for the energy transition, are abundant in this zone. There are still over 90% of species without names. Mining equipment may arrive at the seafloor before science has finished simply naming what’s down there, which is an odd and a little unsettling timing.
Evidence of what that machinery does already exists. In just two months following test mining in 2022, surveys conducted by the UK’s Natural History Museum revealed that species abundance had decreased by more than a third. It is still genuinely unknown, and it most likely will be for some time, whether that damage is reversible or how it interacts with creatures that are hardly cataloged in the first place.
As part of a larger effort to formally describe a thousand new deep-sea species by the end of the decade, Horton and Jaňděewska intend to continue. Twenty-four down. In comparison to what remains unaccounted for in the dark, Jaňděewska herself referred to it as a drop in the ocean.
