A Parapagurus sp. crab with a coral on its back walks across a field of ferromanganese nodules on the seafloor of Gosnold Seamount, explored during Dive 16 of the 2021 North Atlantic Stepping Stones expedition.Uncredited/The Associated Press
Over half of mollusc species that cluster around underwater vents and hold promising potential for medicine and technology are at risk of going extinct due to increasing deep-sea mining, the world’s largest conservation network warned on Thursday.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) renewed its call for a moratorium on such operations before UN-led talks this month. A growing number of firms extract critical minerals such as copper, cobalt or zinc from the superheated fluids emitted by natural hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
These species, though constituting less than 1 per cent of global mollusc biodiversity, play a vital role in the food webs of deep-sea vents.
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According to the IUCN’s latest “Red List” of threatened species, 62 per cent of vent-dwelling mollusc species – 125 out of 201 – are now classified as at risk of extinction due to mining operations, which create sediment blankets that disrupt entire ecosystems.
“Deep-sea mining would smother the entire ecosystem,” Chong Chen, a member of the IUCN’s Mollusc Specialist Group, told Reuters, explaining that the loss of molluscs at a particular vent field would also mean the loss of all other non-mollusc vent species.
Dr. Chen said some of the vent molluscs have already proved to hold value for human society, such as a scaly-foot snail that has developed a biomineralization process that is helping researchers produce nanoparticles for new technologies such as solar cells. Others are being studied to help develop alternatives to plastics.
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“Allowing these species to go extinct could mean also losing biological solutions to future challenges in medicine, materials, and technology before we have even had the chance to discover them,” he added.
The Red List was released ahead of a meeting of the UN’s International Seabed Authority in Jamaica from July 13 to 31 to decide how to regulate metals extraction from the ocean floor.
As with other environmental groups, IUCN has called for such activities to be banned, but many governments want the opposite. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has accelerated permitting for American companies hunting for critical minerals in international waters.