Today, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the release of a new study report, Investigations of Chemosynthetic Communities on the Lower Continental Slope of the Gulf of Mexico. This is the result of a 5 year field study to discover and characterize sea floor communities that live in association with hydrocarbon seeps on the hard ground below depths of 1,000 meters in the Gulf of Mexico. This study was jointly funded by BOEM and NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research. Through this study 107 new species were confirmed; these include crustaceans, copepods, ostracods and tanaidacea. You can read BOEM’s official press release here where you can also find a link to the study.
