Deep sea fish eat their greens

In another new video, scientists filmed deep sea fish eating spinach. That's right, now you can tell your children that there are starving deep sea fish who would love to eat their spinach. And just like my son, they'll say "fine, let the fish have it."

Not only spinach can feed the deep sea, another improbable food source can be trees that fall from the land and sink into the deep sea. Here's a crab, commonly called a squat lobster, that enjoys munching on wood.

First it was hydrothermal vents providing an unusual food source for the deep sea. Then came whale carcasses. Now trees and spinach. All of which overturned the erroneous "bologna sandwich" hypothesis from a few decades ago, which mistakenly held that life was slow and boring in the deep sea, based on a bologna sandwich that failed to decompose.

What could be more exciting than hydrothermal vents or a dead whale ecosystem? A spinach-fall successional pattern?

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