Deep-sea denizens go years without food with clever biological fix
Key takeaways
- A pill bug dwelling under a garden pot curls its body into a tiny armored ball as self-defense.
- Those creatures are called deep-sea isopods, a group of crustaceans with flattened and segmented bodies that, as new research reveals, have resolved the dilemma with a multifaceted biological fix.
- “It is a world of perpetual night and crushing pressure, yet life finds a way,” Xiang said.
Why this matters: local context for readers following news across Pakistan and the region.
Add ARY News on Google AAResize. A pill bug dwelling under a garden pot curls its body into a tiny armored ball as self-defense. Far below the ocean surface, some of its much larger relatives face a harder problem: how to stay alive when the next meal may not come for years.
Those creatures are called deep-sea isopods, a group of crustaceans with flattened and segmented bodies that, as new research reveals, have resolved the dilemma with a multifaceted biological fix.
The realm they inhabit is a cold, dark desert far below the ocean surface where food falls only as rare “snowflakes” of dead organic matter from above, according to crustacean biologist Jianhai Xiang of the Institute of Oceanology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Cell, opens new tab.