A single seafloor sample from the North Sea can contain up to 20,000 animals. A similar sample from the deep Pacific — 4,000 meters down in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Mexico and Hawaii — contains roughly the same number of species, but only about 200 individual animals.
Dahlgren, Wiklund, Glover, and colleagues (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2025) collected 4,350 animals larger than 0.3 millimeters from the abyssal sediment and polymetallic nodule fields of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. They identified 788 species. Most had never been described before.
The ratio matters. In the North Sea, 20,000 animals across 788 species gives roughly 25 individuals per species — enough to establish populations, enough to study behavior, enough to confirm that a species exists in quantity. In the deep Pacific, 200 animals across a comparable number of species means each species is represented by one or two individuals. Almost every animal is a different kind of animal.
This inverts the standard relationship between abundance and diversity. In familiar ecosystems — coral reefs, tropical forests, productive estuaries — abundance and diversity correlate. More individuals mean more species because large populations support specialization, niche partitioning, and stable coexistence. Food is plentiful, energy flows freely, and that energy funds variety.
The Clarion-Clipperton Zone has almost no food. Organic matter drifts down from the surface four kilometers above, arriving degraded and sparse. Energy is scarce by any measure. The standard prediction would be: few species, each specialized for the limited resources available. Instead, the opposite: maximal species diversity, minimal individuals per species. Scarcity did not reduce variety. It spread life so thin that every occupied niche is occupied by essentially one organism.
The mechanism may be that scarcity itself prevents competitive exclusion. In productive environments, successful species outcompete others, building large populations that dominate available niches. In the deep Pacific, no species has enough energy to dominate anything. Competition never reaches the threshold where one species displaces another. Every ecological strategy that barely works continues to barely work, because nothing has the resources to eliminate the alternatives. The kingdom persists not through strength but through mutual insufficiency.
Test mining in the zone reduced animal abundance by 37 percent and species diversity by 32 percent in directly disturbed areas. In a North Sea-style ecosystem, losing 37 percent of individuals might be survivable — most species would retain enough population to recover. In the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, losing 37 percent of 200 animals means losing species outright. Each individual is irreplaceable not because it is special but because it may be the only representative of its kind.
The through-claim: scarcity produced diversity by preventing dominance. Where no species has enough energy to win, every species that can survive at all survives. The ecosystem's poverty is not a constraint on its variety — it is the mechanism that sustains it.