The deep sea may not seem like a crucible of evolution. For me, according to Darwin, evolution is correlate to natural selection. Compare with the organism living in land and shallow seas, they may have more competition to survive especially when human take control in the world — cause many pollution and destruction. So evolution rates are increase in the name of survival.
But, to the surprise of biologists, a new construction of the coral family tree suggests that evolution proceeds at full bore in waters well below where sunlight penetrates. Moreover, some coral diversity may have bloomed there first, before spreading coastward—the reverse of what has long been thought. “As people look in the deep sea, they are finding much more diversity than they expected,” says Clifford Cunningham, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “We’re just at the very beginning of understanding deep-sea evolution.”
Besides that, the evolution potential not only seem in coral, but in other deep sea organism too. Marymegan Daly, a systematist at Ohio State University, Columbus, and co-coordinator of the Cnidarian Tree of Life project, has found a similar pattern among the sea anemones she’s analyzed. “We see lots of radiations of deep-deep sea forms,” she reported. In short, concludes France, “we can’t say that the deep sea is a boring
environment in terms of evolution.”
I think this are the beginning of the new saga in evolutionary study to understand the evolution pattern in deep sea.
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