The role of hydrodynamics for the spatial distribution of high-temperature hydrothermal vent-endemic fauna in the deep ocean environment

Abstract

Active hydrothermal vents provide the surrounding submarine environment with substantial amounts of matter and energy, thus serving as important habitats for diverse megabenthic communities in the deep ocean and constituting a unique, highly productive chemosynthetic ecosystem on Earth. Vent-endemic biological communities gather near the venting site and are usually not found beyond a distance of the order of 100 m from the vent. This is surprising because one would actually expect matter ejected from high-temperature vents, which generate highly turbulent buoyancy plumes, to be suspended and carried far away by the plume flows and deep-sea currents. Here, we study this problem from a fluid dynamics perspective by simulating the vent hydrodynamics using a numerical model that couples the plume flow with induced matter and energy transport. We find that both low- and high-temperature vents deposit most vent matter relatively close to the plume. In particular, the tendency of turbulent buoyancy plumes to carry matter far away is strongly counteracted by generated entrainment flows back into the plume stem. The deposition ranges of organic and inorganic hydrothermal particles obtained from the simulations for various natural high-temperature vents are consistent with the observed maximum spatial extent of biological communities, evidencing that plume hydrodynamics exercises strong control over the spatial distribution of vent-endemic fauna. While other factors affecting the spatial distribution of vent-endemic fauna, such as geology and geochemistry, are site-specific, the main physical features of plume hydrodynamics unraveled in this study are largely site-unspecific and therefore universal across vent sites on Earth.