it results in being all higher.

Higher current flow.

But then there's a group of animals that use these corals to live on to get up off of the bottom.

Same thing for sponges.

They're very small crabs, brittle stars, shrimp, and they're all living in tight association with these corals and these sponges, and it gives them a way, 'cause they're tiny, to get off of that low flow of water, presumably to get further up into the water.

The corals provide them some protection.

They may help clean the corals, and they may even p- prevent some type of a predation from them.

Uh-

Yeah

... and various other types of things goin' on.

The second thing is that the animals are not distributed uniformly, at least on seamounts, because I've been mostly working on seamounts, and what I mean by that is you can go to a seamount, or you can go to a part of a seamount, and you will hardly see anything on it.

It's just rock, and it's just kinda barren, and you're trying to scratch your head like, "Why is that?" You know, we're not seeing, we're not even seein', you know, sea lilies or, you know, brittle stars or anything like that.

And then you'll go to another part of that seamount, or a different seamount, and you can't set the vehicle down.

The, uh, number of animals, particularly corals and sponges and other things, is so dense that you can't even stop and land on the bottom without crushing a lot of animals.

You have to just hover in their, in their just amazingly dense communities, and we're trying to figure out why.

Mm