Unlikely Gathering

On a subsea mountain peak 400km south of New Zealand, a robot submarine has filmed tens of millions of waving five-armed creatures called brittlestars, in a never-seen-before seamount discovery. Scientists from New Zealand and Australia discovered “Brittlestar City” on a peak in the Macquarie Range, where the starfish-like creatures colonized against daunting odds on an underwater summit higher than the world’s tallest building. NIWA ecologist Dr Ashley Rowden said the aggregation of brittlestars was amazing. “The implications of the find for our understanding of the relative uniqueness of seamount assemblages are potentially far-reaching,” Rowden said.