Related Content
Search Google Scholar for:
More Information
Related Jobs from ScienceCareers
|
|
Science 26 October 2001:
Vol. 294. no. 5543, p. 741
DOI: 10.1126/science.294.5543.741g
|
|
This Week in Science
Hydrothermal vents on mid-ocean ridges support a surprisingly diverse fauna of chemosynthetic organisms. Although some sparse sampling has been performed on the Pacific and Atlantic sea floor, little is known about the fauna from the Indian Ocean. Van Dover et al. (p. 818) sampled and analyzed fauna from two hydrothermal vents, the Kairei and Edmond, along the Central Indian Ridge. They found a potentially new family of scaly-foot gastropods, faunal affinities with some of the western Pacific vent fauna, the absence of some major Pacific fauna (such as tubeworms), and a dominant shrimp species that has only evolved in the past 500,000 years that has affinities to Atlantic vent shrimp. The Indian Ocean fauna from these two vents represent a new biogeographic province with affinities to, and differences from, other oceanic ridge provinces that are thousands of kilometers away, but that are still in evolutionary communication over geologic time scales.
CREDIT: VAN DOVER ET AL.
|
|
Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)
