Growing Up in the Deep-Sea

VALERIA TESO; LEONEL PACHECO; MARIANO MARTINEZ; DANIEL LAURETTA; GUIDO PASTORINO; DIEGO URTEAGA; ANDRÉS AVERBUJ; MARTÍN BROGGER; FLORENCIA ARRIGHETTI; PAMELA RIVADENEIRA; JONATHAN FLORES; RENATA PERTOSSI; NOELIA SANCHEZ; JAVIER DI LUCA; CARLOS ANTELO SANCHEZ; JESSICA RISARIO; ROCÍO CIOCCO; PABLO PENCHASZADEH

Environment Coastal & Offshore Magazine

Technology Systems Corporation

Año: 2020

Between 2012-2013 we study the reproductive mode of deep-sea invertebrates from the Southwestern Atlantic after a series of cruises on board of the B/O “Puerto Deseado”, with focus on the submarine canyon of Mar del Plata (about 38°S and up to 3,500 m depth). This region of the world is poorly known and is very interesting because like other deep-sea submarine canyons is a hotspot of biodiversity. Focusing our research in a hotspot area reduces the sampling time and helps in our challenge to know more about this benthic community. In addition, this area has a particular interaction between ocean dynamics, tectonic processes, sea level fluctuations and partly gravitational processes. After these cruises, several new species were described and many new cases of brooding of different phyla were observed in the study area. Several authors support the idea that incubation is characterized by a stable and structured environment of low temperature, as it increases when the latitude and depth are greater. These results showed that some kind of protected development, with avoidance of a free swimming larval stage could be much more frequently than we previously thought. These new evidences give more support to several publications from the last years where they try to explain why the southwestern Atlantic is the scenario with a large proportion of species with direct development, when compared to the intertropical and cold regions of the northern hemisphere.