5,000 deep-sea animals new to science turned up in ocean records
More than 5,000 animal species previously unknown to science live in a pristine part of the deep sea. Their home — called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone — sits in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. The zone is roughly twice the size of India, sits 4,000 to 6,000 meters deep and is largely a mystery, like much of the deep sea. In a new study, scientists amassed and analyzed more than 100,000 published records of animals found in the zone, with some records dating back to the 1870s. About 90 percent of species from these records were previously undescribed: There were only about 440 named species compared with roughly 5,100 without scientific names. Worms and arthropods make up the bulk of the undescribed creatures, but other animals found there include sponges, sea cucumbers and corals, the researchers report May 25 in Current Biology. “The diversity down there does surprise me,”...