Sea cucumber or giant deep sea maggot? 🤔 the jury’s still out. Found this beauty on our last #woodfall dive today! #deepsea #echinoderms

If you do hard things, you get an awesome hat! 👩🏻‍🔬 Thank you for everything @DrCraigMc @CajunPlankton @grangerhanks10 !! Grateful is an understatement.

Alligators are an effective way to fuel deep sea communities. #research from @benthic_bryant #science #alligator #deepsea Read more here: https://t.co/Fg8DlSfkeD

13/End. Check out the paper (linked in the first tweet) for the full story. Huge thanks to my fantastic co-authors @DrCraigMc @grangerhanks10 @seagrifo for making this paper such a joy and to Craig in particular for always reminding us that science should be fun!

12. We also demonstrate that alligators are a viable carbon pathway not only for scavenging communities but for animals living within the sediment as well.

11. Our findings suggest intermediately sized, reptilian food falls support diversity on the deep sea floor by creating unique patches among the mosaic of communities, filtering for unique suites of species.

10. We found that there were significant shifts in community composition with distance from the alligator fall, with the cores closest to the carcass hosting more individuals across a different suite of species relative to background cores.

9. Total abundance decreased significantly with distance from the alligator fall (inner > outer > background), but species richness and Simpson’s evenness did not vary among the distance groups (Fig 3b-d).

8. We counted and identified 120 individuals across 44 species in our 18 cores from around the alligator fall. Most abundant, unsurprisingly, were polychaetes, but we also found many crustaceans, molluscs, and others.

7. And yes, Frankie 3-fingers the alligator fall HAD enriched the sediment surrounding it with food! We found a 2.5x increase in mean total organic carbon closest to the alligator fall (inner) relative to background cores (Fig 3a). But what did this food mean for the animals?

6. At the time of collection, Frankie had been reduced to just a skeleton by scavenging activity. We wanted to know if, during degradation, the carcass had enriched the surrounding sediment with food, and if so, if it had influenced the community living there.

5. As part of our alligator fall experiment, at 51 days post-deployment we collected sediment cores from around one alligator carcass (affectionately named Frankie 3-fingers).

4. However, we still aren’t sure about the influence of food falls from the middle size group, like porpoises, seals, seal lions, and….. you guessed it, Louisiana’s finest: alligators.

3. But not all food falls are created equal. For starters, they vary in size from < 1 kg to over 1,000 kg. Really small (jellyfish, wood, etc) and really large (whales) food falls have gotten lots of attention. These both contribute to diversity, albeit in different ways

2. So what promotes variability of food among patches? One option is #foodfalls: large, bulk parcels of food (animal carcasses or plant material) which sink quickly, arriving to the seafloor as high quality buffets

1. Among the many mysteries of the #deepsea is how, in such an extreme environment, is diversity so high? One theory is Grassle and Sanders’ patch-mosaic hypothesis: variability in resources + many localized disturbances create a mosaic of patches with unique communities

Happy to announce I've officially advanced to candidacy following successful completion of comprehensive exams this week! ✨ To celebrate, I'm sharing findings from my 1st first-author paper, the shiny new, hot off the presses, Bryant et al 2022: a thread

Bryant et al 2022 coming soon ✨ sharing details about the communities of wee beasties around our alligator fall on the #deepsea floor 🐊🐚🦀

Starting in ten minutes!!!

It’s gonna be a great time LIVE tonight!