Such oxygen measurements allowed the researchers to estimate how much food these organisms were consuming. Finally, they used a seafloor-crawling robot, the Benthic Rover, to measure the amount of oxygen being consumed by animals and microbes in the sediment. This allowed them to track the behavior, numbers, and sizes of larger deep-sea animals such as sea cucumbers. They also used automated camera systems to take time-lapse photographs of the seafloor. They suspended conical "sediment traps" above the seafloor to collect and measure the amount of marine snow falling through the water. Smith and his colleagues used several instruments to study the amount of marine snow arriving at Station M, as well as its impacts on life in the deep. However, in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Smith and his coauthors show that occasional feasts could provide enough food to support deep-sea communities for years at a time. The slow trickle of marine snow sinking down from above does not provide nearly enough food to support all the organisms that live down there. Researchers have long wondered how all these animals and microbes get enough food to survive. In addition, a myriad of smaller animals and microbes live buried within the mud. The muddy seafloor at Station M - 4,000 meters (13,100) feet below the surface - is home to a variety of deep-sea animals, from sea cucumbers and sea urchins to grenadier fish. For over 20 years, Smith and his fellow researchers have studied animals living on the abyssal plain at Station M - a deep-sea research site about 220 kilometers (140 miles) off the Central California coast.
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