Hydrothermal Vent Ecosystems and Conservation

A decade of Ridge 2000 and related research has yielded new and refined understanding of events and processes that occur on mid-ocean ridge and back-arc spreading centers, as reported in this special issue of Oceanography. Exciting exploration has also continued, with the past decade witnessing discovery of vent ecosystems in the Arctic (Pedersen et al., 2010), a new vent biogeographic province in the Southern Ocean (Rogers et al., 2012), and what may be a new vent province in the Caribbean, where the deepest known vent site was found on the Cayman Rise (Connelly et al., 2012). These recently discovered sites are home to many species new to science, some of which are especially strange in their abundance and distribution, including relatives of the yeti crab (Macpherson et al., 2006) reported from vents of the Scotia back arc (Rogers et al., 2012).