Dropped a baited camera lander last week onto a flat patch of abyssal mud at 4,800 m, and within 12 minutes the view was swarming with brittle stars, amphipods, and a pale holothurian methodically vacuuming the bait halo. For those curious about abyssal ecology, how are you framing the sensory cues and energy economics that let fauna in such a food-poor world converge so fast?
I’d frame it as a small-scale ‘odor highway’ in the benthic boundary layer: nanomolar amino‑acid plumes get stretched by shear and advected, letting hyper‑sensitive amphipods and ophiuroids home in fast while the holothurian slow‑vacuums like a Roomba. If you can pair the lander with a near‑bed current meter and a tiny fluorescein or rhodamine dye pulse, you’ll map plume footprint and predict arrival times; small caveat, some “arrivals” may be locals emerging from the top centimeter. Did you log current at 10–50 cm off bottom?
If ‘12 minutes’ holds, arrivals likely <50 m; check ADCP logs or add a cheap near-bed logger, @amelia_201.