UK scientists have found prodigious numbers of a new crab species on the Southern Ocean floor that they have dubbed "The Hoff" because of its hairy chest.
The animal was discovered living around volcanic vents off South Georgia.
Great piles of the crabs were seen to come together.
The creature has still to be formally classified, hence the humorous nickname that honours the often bare-chested US actor David Hasselhoff.
It is, however, a type of yeti crab, said Professor Alex Rogers who led the research cruise that found the animal, and it will be given a formal scientific name in due course.
Yeti crabs were first identified in the southern Pacific and are recognised for their hairs, or setae, along their claws and limbs that they use to cultivate the bacteria which they then eat.
But the new species found around the vents that populate the East Scotia Ridge are slightly different in that they exhibit long setae on their ventral surface - on their undersides.
"Their nickname on the cruise ship was the 'Hasselhoff crab', which gives you some idea of what they look like," explained Dr Rogers from Oxford University's Department of Zoology.
"The crab occurs in staggering densities. It is just incredible to see these animals literally lying in heaps around the diffuse flow of these vents.
"In places, they reached as many as 600 individuals per square metre."
The Hoff crab is just one of a number of species new to science to come out of the cruise, which also included researchers from the University of Southampton, the National Oceanography Centre and the British Antarctic Survey.
The team reports novel types of starfish, barnacles, sea anemones, and even an octopus - all living some 2,500m down.
The cruise employed the UK deep-diving robotic submersible, Isis, to investigate the slowly spreading ridge near Antarctica.
It is dotted with hydrothermal vents - cracks in the volcanic rock where mineral-rich, hot waters gush from below the seabed to sustain an extraordinary array of organisms.
Read more at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16394430
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