MOSS LANDING: The golf ball-sized snails rock out near hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, as deep as 11,500 feet. Deep sea snails living in the dark, hot and acidic environment around hydrothermal vents are pretty punk rock, scientists have concluded. Shannon Johnson, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, has named a newly discovered species of deep sea snail after Clash leader Joe Strummer.
A paper describing the Joe Strummer snail and four similar species was published this month in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity.
“I do a lot of outreach, and when I talk to kids I always tell them these snails are punk rock,” said Shannon Johnson, a scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the lead author on the paper. “So, when it came time to name them, we were like — we should totally name them after a punk rocker.”
Johnson said the team chose Strummer not just because of his iconic punk status, but also because he was an environmentalist who strove to be a carbon-neutral artist.
“The deep sea is the biggest unexplored environment in the world,” she said.
Alviniconcha strummeri and the other snails named in the paper are what are called cryptic species, meaning it is impossible to tell them apart by looks alone. They have relatively thin shells, and grow quite large –somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a softball. The color of their shells changes depending on the chemical makeup of their environment.
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