Five arms, no heart and a global family: what DNA revealed about the weird deep-sea world of brittle stars

By Tim O'Hara, Senior Curator of Marine Invertebrates, Museums Victoria Research Institute

You may have read that the deep sea is a very different environment from the land and shallow water. There is no light, it is very cold, and the pressure of all the water above is immense.

Plants can’t grow there, and the energy powering life mostly comes from organic matter sinking from the sunlit surface. These facts have been known for more than 150 years.

But I want to tell you something you probably don’t know about the deep sea: for animals on the seafloor, it is a very connected environment.…

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