“Rare” supergent crustacean can after all be present in 60% of the ocean bottom

We thought it was very rare, but after all it can dwell in most of our oceans. This bizarre crustacean looks like a shrimp. Only it’s giant.

A A. Gigantea It is very large: it can reach up to 34 centimeters, and it is the largest known species of amphophous. It looks like a shrimp… but whitetting, and huge. So far, we believed it was very rare, but we may have been wrong.

“Historically, it has been sampled or observed with little frequency compared to other deep sea amphipods, which suggests low population densities“, Says Marine Biologist Paige Maroni at the University of Western Australia and author of the published in Royal Society Open Science This month.

“And, as it was not often found, little was known about demography, genetic variation and population dynamics, with only seven published studies on DNA sequence data,” he explains, quoted by

Mass A. Gigantea It can, after all, be very spread, occupying 59% of the world’s oceans – Your apparent scarcity is another product of our own observation trend.

A team of investigators collected 195 records of A. Giganteafrom 75 different places in the deep sea of ​​the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, from depths of 3890 to 8931 meters, as well as some specimen to sequence their genomes and found them in Fracture zones in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

“As the exploration of the sea bottom increases to depths beyond most conventional samples, there is increasing evidence that the largest crustacean in the world of the world in the world is far from rare,” says Maroni.