Animal Traces on the Deep-Sea Floor

The deep-sea floor is a cold, dark, forbidding place, yet it harbors a significant number of trace-making organisms. These animals include enter opneusts, polychaetes, arthropods, holothurians, echinoids, and stelleroids, especially, and scattered representatives of other groups. Most tracemakers are mobile deposit feeders specifically adapted for gathering food in the abyss, and they leave behind a characteristic array of tracks, trails, shalloio burrows, and fecal castings.

Most deep-sea animal traces are made on the substrate surface or shallowly within it; but because very slow depositional rates generally permit extensive sediment reworking-even by very sparsely populated animals-the entire length of cores may exhibit bioturbate textures. Structures observed in cores and in photographs of the modern abyssal seafloor are valuable in the interpretation of suspected deep-water trace fossils contained in the geologic record.