Bright Yellow Terebellid Worm In Action
The terebellid polychaete worm sticks out on a muddy seamount with its mass of bright yellow tentacles crowning its tapered, segmented body. This species spends much of its life buried in a tube of soft sediment and gravel. As a deposit feeder, it extends fine-haired tentacles to reach far from its body and gather particles of decaying detritus from the seafloor.
Anegada Passage & the British Virgin Islands' Seamounts
Within the Caribbean region, numerous unexplored seamounts punctuate the seafloor holding records of geologic, biologic and oceanographic processes over different time-scales. Seamounts are topographically and oceanographically complex with environmental characteristics that vary greatly and have often been suggested to be biodiversity hotspots, however, many of these hypotheses are only beginning to be explored in detail.
