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Thirteen months later, populations of these kinds of mobile deep sea dwellers, known as swimming benthos, had dropped by 43 percent in the mining location and 56 percent in adjacent areas surrounding the site.

But they do know this: The brittle star has thousands of pig snouts on each arm, a veritable sty in the benthos.

The dominant feature in the plots rendered by acoustic queries into the benthos is still that dense, impenetrable cloud of the deep scattering layer.

Moreover, more medusae formed in waters that had fewer bottom dwellers, or ‘benthos’ — animals such as starfish, sea slugs, shrimp and fish — and greater environmental disturbance.

His wife, Barbara, worked on the flora and fauna of the benthos, the bottom layer, where clams live.