In this 1937 Atlantic article, “Undersea“, Rachel Carson has a way with words and described the benthos before SCUBA was invented, and the Challenger deep descended. I should have cited this piece in my book, Assessments and Conservation of Biological Diversity from Coral Reefs to the Deep Sea: Uncovering Buried Treasures and the Value of the Benthos, which discussed the same topic and intentions. I was just more long-winded. Feel free to make a comparison. : )
“…The ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is the home of the great white shark, two-thousand-pound killer of the seas, and of the hundred-foot blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived. It is also the home of living things so small that your two hands might scoop up as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way. And it is because of the flowering of astronomical numbers of these diminutive plants, known as diatoms, that the surface waters of the ocean are in reality boundless pastures. Every marine animal, from the smallest to the sharks and whales, is ultimately dependent for its food upon these microscopic entities of the vegetable life of the ocean. Within their fragile walls, the sea performs a vital alchemy that utilizes the sterile chemical elements dissolved in the water and welds them with the torch of sunlight into the stuff of life. Only through this little-understood synthesis of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates by myriad plant ‘producers’ is the mineral wealth of the sea made available to the animal ‘consumers’ that browse as they float with the currents. Drifting endlessly, midway between the sea of air above and the depths of the abyss below, these strange creatures and the marine inflorescence that sustains them are called ‘plankton’ — the wanderers….
Because the last vestige of plant life was left behind in the shallow zone penetrated by the rays of the sun, the inhabitants of these depths contrast strangely with the self-supporting assemblage of the surface waters. Preying one upon another, the abyssal creatures are ultimately dependent upon the slow rain of dead plants and animals from above. Every living thing of the ocean, plant and animal alike, returns to the water at the end of its own life span the materials that had been temporarily assembled to form its body. So there descends into the depths a gentle, neverending rain of the disintegrating particles of what once were living creatures of the sunlit surface waters, or of those twilight regions beneath….”
Lopez Lab @ NSU 