By Susan Milius
Biologists looked into the abyss and the abyss looked back, with lots of little compound krill eyes.
The shrimplike Antarctic krill, a major player in polar ecosystems, is supposedly a creature of the upper ocean. Yet the first science cruise to lower a camera to the abyssal seabed of the Southern Ocean off Antarctica found what looked like krill 3,000 meters down, says Andrew Clarke of the British Antarctic Survey based in Cambridge, England.