Desk-based deep sea exploration

Abstract

e-ISSN: 1948-6596 https://escholarship.org/uc/fb doi:10.21425/F59235175 Book Review Desk-based deep sea exploration Biological Sampling in the Deep Sea, by Malcolm R. Clark, Mireille Consalvey, and Ashley A. Rowden (editors), 2016 Wiley-Blackwell, 466 pp., ISBN: 9780470656747 “Well if you go one-on-one with a limpet you can learn an enormous amount. You can do that. How do you do that with a great white shark or blue whale? There’s this barrier to what I would call natural history.” Bob Paine, interviewed in 2013 1 As a macroecologist, I don't get out much. Grow- ing fat on Other People’s Data, the temptation is simply to sit and process and analyse and publish on whatever system provides the best API (Application Programming Interface). However, I have always shared Paine’s view that it is im- portant to have a feel for the natural history of your subject too. Starting out, I worked -- as was more or less obligatory at the time, for a macroe- cologist -- on birds. I'm no twitcher, but I do get birds. I enjoy watching them, and have a sense of their lives and of their interactions with the envi- ronment. There is no barrier to natural history there, especially working with a nice colour field guide at hand to remind me of the feathered real- ity of my rows of data. Shifting my focus to the macroecology of marine ecosystems, I maintained a similar rou- tine: greedily hoovering up data, keeping a stock of glossy pictures and natural history monographs close by. This was all well and good when working on the shelf seas. I had never been out for more than a few hours of boat based sampling, but the general process -- whether sampling by trawl, box core, or scuba -- was at least familiar enough that the idea of going ‘one-on-one’ with the organisms did not feel outlandish. But then I started to ven- ture off the shelf, into the world’s biggest ecosys- tems in the deep sea (e.g. Webb et al. 2010). In this alien setting, even something as apparently straightforward as casting and hauling in a net starts to seem unfeasible as you realise that the cables involved must be passing 3, 4, 5 km in length… I approached Clark et al.’s book, then, probably not as a member of its main target audi- ence. I had no intention of putting any of the de- tailed protocols for different sampling gears into practice 2 , but read it rather as someone hoping to get a feel for the labour that has gone into the data I analyse, and thus of its potential and limi- tations for macroecological research. Even viewed from this somewhat oblique angle, the book stands up very well. The first chapters pre- sent a broad overview of the ‘deep sea’, and in so doing reveal its complexities and heterogeneities. Tyler et al. (Chapter 1) provide an excellent pri- mer on the habitats of the deep sea floor, as well as a very readable history of key points in its dis- covery, from the early ‘heroic’ age through the first quantitative studies and on to the finer scale, more systematic approaches now possible using new imaging and geolocation technologies. For instance, they show how recent, high resolution exploration of the abyssal plain -- previously thought to be flat and boring -- has revealed in- teresting biogenic and abiotic structuring down to sub-metre scales. In the next chapter, Schiaparelli et al. move from habitats to organisms, with an overview of key deep sea taxa as well as of broad patterns in their distribution. This covers several topics likely to be of interest to macroecologists, including the widespread occurrence of both miniaturisation and of gigantism in the deep sea, driven largely by energetics. They also describe the feature that has really drawn me to deep sea macroecology: 1 http://www.biodiverseperspectives.com/2013/09/10/diverse-introspectives-a-conversation-with-bob-paine/ 2 Or so I thought: by a strange twist of fate I write this on board the RV Pelican in the Gulf of Mexico, a mile and more of cable stretching below us. But that’s another story. Frontiers of Biogeography 2017, 9.2, e35175 © the authors, CC-BY license