In the late 1970s, scientists started getting very interested in deep-sea acorn worms. However, despite numerous images, these organisms eluded capture owing to their extreme fragility and their identity remained a mystery for many years. These traces were also known, but unexplained, in the fossil record from around the age of the last dinosaurs until the present.
Two pioneers of this technique - Bruce Heezen from New York’s Columbia University and Charles Hollister from Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute in Boston USA – started noticing some strange spiral traces on the seafloor and reported on them in their iconic 1971 book “Face of the Deep”. With the development of deep-sea floor photography from the 1960s, mass imagery of the deep seafloor became possible. This group has since been found to the incredible depth of 8116 m in the sub-Antarctic trenches. The first deep-sea species – a burrowing form found at 4570 m depth in the Atlantic called Glandiceps abyssicola – was described in 1893 by Johann Spengel, a German zoologist fascinated by acorn worms. There are approximately 90 described species of acorn worm and, like many animals, they were first found in the deep sea by the Challenger expedition of 1872-1876. We won’t dwell on any similarities in shape… Basically, these worms are one of our nearest relatives living in the sediments of the Clarion Clipperton Zone. sea stars, sea cucumbers) are the closest invertebrate (without a backbone) relatives to the vertebrates (the animals with backbones) - the group to which we belong as humans. The acorn worms, together with the echinoderms (e.g. We have taken samples for DNA analysis and for microscopic assessment back at home – it may even be a new species! But why do we find acorn worms so fascinating?Īcorn worm sampled on the SMARTEX expeditionĪcorn worms are a group of animals that are commonly found burrowing in soft sediment from the seashore to the deep sea. This looked very much like a surface-dwelling acorn worm, or enteropneust – to our knowledge the first captured in the CCZ.
Looking through the cold water on top we caught a glimpse of a large yellow worm on the surface. During the night a boxcore came up onto the deck of RRS James Cook.
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