The deep-sea chemoautotroph microbial world as experienced by the Mediterranean metazoans through time

Abstract

This paper is focused upon the Miocene-to-Recent deep-sea chemosynthetic ecosystems of the Mediterranean basin with emphasis on their metazoan associates. The life ingredients of this story are basically the "microbes" and the "metazoans", in particular molluscs, whose mutual interplay resulted in a superb variety of situations in response to geologic and oceanographic factors directing the production and availability of geofluids usable by microbial consortia. The astounding complexity and diversity of modern metazoan-bearing deep-sea ecosystems inhabiting the Mediterranean is a step of a long journey whose beginning dates back to more than 3 billion years ago and whose major events are resumed below. © 2011 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.