And this gas and oil is in turn, pumping gas and oil into the water column. There are giant tube worms, there are mussels that live with bacteria in their gills and can feed on this oil and gas coming out of the bottom. There's white ghost crabs and shrimp. Many of the things we see at the hot vents, we see at these cold seeps. The deep bottom of the Gulf of Mexico literally seeps oil and gas into the water above it.
Chemosynthetic communities are probably more common than photosynthetic communities.
These are communities that live everywhere from the dark of a cave on land to inside ice and rock underneath the earth. The food is all coming from chemical energy, using oxygen and then some of these chemicals that are in the environment. So it's a different kind of food web. The recent deep-sea exploration of the Gulf of Mexico points out not only the unusual lifeforms on the Gulf Bottom, but also some of the unique terrain. It's where the plates kind of separated long ago, back when Africa and other things were connected together.