60% of The Ocean Floor Could Harbor 'Rare' Supergiant Crustacean

60% of The Ocean Floor Could Harbor 'Rare' Supergiant Crustacean

Far beneath the wavetops, down into the dark ocean depths, a rarely seen crustacean makes its home.It's called Alicella gigantea, and it's the largest known species of amphipod, a shrimp-like species that is usually less than the size of your fingertip. By this measure, A. gigantea is a gargantuan: it can reach up to 34 centimeters (13.4 inches), as far as we have been able to verify. We thought that these creatures were pretty rare; very fe…

Meet the supergiant that's quietly lurking across 60 per cent of Earth's oceans - The Weather Network

It turns out this rare supergiant isnt so rare, after all.

Supergiant crustaceans could live across half the deep-sea floor

The enigmatic crustacean Alicella gigantea is the world’s largest amphipod, but like all deep-sea creatures it hasn’t proved easy to findA giant crustacean that resembles a large white shrimp may be far more common across the deep sea than thought, with potential habitat extending over much of the ocean floor.“We have called this species rare for so long. We call everything in the deep sea rare,” says Paige Maroni at the University of Western Au…