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Our first dive went to Snail Vent and then we went to the newly discovered Urashima site,

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and we went there because there’s a number of spots with iron mats.

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Snail Vent gets its name from the big, hairy snails that are there.

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They can get really quite big…about that big. And they have endosymbiotic bacteria in their gills.

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We saw a crab fight where this big one was diving after a smaller one.

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They are pretty aggressive.

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They are essentially predators in the system. They’re kind of the top predator. They seem to go after anything.

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Often, I find what I love to do with the camera is look really closely at what the animals are doing.

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So we have a mixed community here, definitely, of sulfur oxidizers and iron oxidizers.

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These mats are very heterogeneous.

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That’s one of the main reasons why we’ve moved to this fine-scale sampling with the Bio-Mat Sampler,

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so that we can try to get in, to get at each of those different kinds, where we didn’t have, ten years ago, we didn’t have that capability.