Seeps and vents of the Bering Sea

This special issue focuses on hydrothermal vent and methane seep fauna and communities in the Bering Sea. Although fragmentary information has been previously published on the hydrothermal vents, data on methane seep communities from the Bering Sea are presented here for the first time. Hydrocarbon seeps and hydrothermal vents provide specific habitats that are influenced by seabed emissions of fluids rich in reduced compounds. Communities inhabiting hydrothermal vents and seeps below the photic zone, mostly depend on autochthonous primary organic matter synthesized by symbiotic and free-living microbes through chemoautolithotrophy or methanotrophy. Chemosynthetic communities are highly productive, compared to the surrounding benthic areas. Discovered nearly 40 years ago (Corliss et al., 1979; Paull et al., 1984), and intensively studied since then (Van Dover, 2000; German et al., 2011; Levin et al., 2016 and others), vent and seep communities are still of great research interest. This includes: faunistic and ecological distinctiveness of chemosynthetic communities, adaptations to extreme conditions and understanding the evolution of marine ecosystems. Recent proposals for seabed mineral exploitation also require knowledge on chemosynthetic ecosystems for rational management decisions (Jones et al., 2020; Van Dover et al., 2018)