Does the Food Chain Really Matter?

Life is a food chain. Though the notion may be unappetizing to many of us, it reflects the simple and efficient reality of our earthly lot. Life thrives within and despite the order of predation in which it finds itself. Life-forms in one echelon have no choice but to consume the life-forms animating the rank below. At the top, we may choose what, but not if we eat, and can do nothing about our reintroduction, however elaborate and evasive the process may be, back into the food chain.

To the gentlest link of all we owe the regeneration of life and, in some cases, the miracle of life itself.¹ Bacteria, which compose the lowest rung, feed off what’s left once the food chain has run its course: organic detritus. In the sea, this detritus is the residue of marine snow, itself a precipitation of what’s left after life has been tumbled through its fated line of predators. As marine snow drifts down through the frigid depths toward the lightless ocean bottom, its flakes provide sites of consumption as they fall. What settles on the seabed to collect as deep-sea sediment is the most refractory parts, perhaps chitin from crustaceans or cellulose from plants. It is this last residue of life that benthic bacteria consume, incorporating some stubborn elements into its own commodious biomass while releasing other nutritive elements into the water. The meiofauna² that graze on that bacterial biomass perform the next step in churning organic matter back into the food chain.

Collect all those nodules from the CCZ seabed and the one who gets there first would have a 21-billion-ton haul to gloat over.

Two and a half miles below the ocean’s surface lies a seabed in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Strewn across it, millions of years in the making, are potato-sized polymetallic nodules composed of copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements. These elements are extremely interesting for modern societies who depend on touch screens and smartphones. They are critical to turbo-charged economies driven by high-tech, weapons, and AI industries. Collect all those nodules from the CCZ seabed and the one who gets there first would have a 21-billion-ton haul to gloat over. Not grabbing those nodules — or worse, letting China grab them — would quite probably constitute a national emergency for one nation in particular.

The CCZ lies between Mexico and Hawaii and therefore falls under the administration of the International Seabed Authority, which regulates mining of the ocean floor in international waters. Back in the 1990s every coastal nation agreed to join the ISA except for the United States, which prudently refrained. Since that time, ISA members have been dithering about whether to mine the abyssal seabed of the CCZ. They know that its deep-sea benthos — as all deep-sea benthos — serves in some mysterious way as the engine of marine life. Disrupt that benthos and there would be consequences to the oceanic food chain and everything connected with it, including the fishing industry. The ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would also be affected.

While the ISA cannot deny the deep-sea food chain impacts everything, The Metals Company can. Impatient to get down there and start mining, TMC reported that its own environmental research shows concerns are overblown. “We believe we have sufficient knowledge to get started and prove we can manage environmental risks,” Gerard Barron, TMC Chairman and CEO, said recently.³ Not only could his company manage the risks, he said it could minimize impact,⁴ a curious claim when “minimal” in this context is meaningless. Minimal compared to what? What would maximum impact be? 

The cautious ISA felt it might not be such a bad idea to learn what was down there before it all got dredged up. And what wonders they found . . . 

A regrettable discovery had something to do with the stalked glass sponge.

In researching the CCZ seabed, scientists found a surprising abundance and variety of life, with over half the species collected new to science. One regrettable discovery had something to do with the stalked glass sponge. It so happens the stalked glass sponge lives on the polymetallic nodules mining companies would like to have. It so happens that the stalked glass sponge supports a high diversity of associated fauna, serving as a veritable lynchpin in the deep-sea ecosystem. Sophisticated experiments have determined that if you take its base away — that polymetallic nodule — the sponge living on it disappears, too. They also determined that the sponge does not reappear even decades afterward because — apparently no one thought of this — no one returned the sponge’s home, the nodule. But on what else is the beautiful and delicate sessile sponge to reside in that soft sediment? Scientists have no answer. TMC is not looking into solutions. 

So what about the cradle of life, the gentle bacteria that animate deep-sea sediment? To assess the disruption seabed mining might cause to them, researchers simulated mining-related disturbances by repeatedly plowing the seafloor.⁵ On returning 26 years later, they found the plow tracks clearly visible but only rudimentary bacterial life. And that was just an experiment; deep-sea sediment, including the nodules, was merely plowed under. Actual deep-sea mining does not disturb the seabed; it removes it, bacteria and all. The mining process scrapes off the top 5 to 15 centimeters of sediment, sucks it up to the ship, picks out the polymetallic nodules, and dumps what was the seabed back into the ocean as “waste,” Barron’s “minimal impact.” 

Devastating damage was recorded on the few square kilometers of seabed where mining was simulated. Commercial deep-sea mining companies stand ready to obliterate thousands of square kilometers of seabed every year. The prospective risk is indefensible, with scientists predicting a massive and lasting impact on ecosystem functions and microbial communities at the seafloor, incalculable in both degree and scope. For that reason, the ISA has taken some time to draw up a regulatory framework.

The U.S.’s “rigorous regulatory framework” is illusory.

Chafing at the delay, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on April 24, 2025, instructing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “to expedite permits for companies to mine in both international and U.S. territorial waters.”⁶ Based on the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980, Trump’s executive order defies the jurisdiction of the ISA, international law, and a global agreement to delay deep-sea mining. 

Extolling Trump’s leadership, Barron stated his confidence in the U.S. regulatory framework, saying it offers a path forward that is both predictable and enforceable. But any U.S. regulatory framework is illusory, based as it is on the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act enforced by the EPA, all of which Trump has gutted.⁷ In fact, the key feature of U.S. regulation, as propounded by NOAA, is regulatory flexibility with acknowledgement that “trade-offs are required for a new industry.”⁸

Willing to risk all for his cut in the $20 trillion booty lying down there guarded by nothing fiercer than the still and fragile stalked glass sponge, dastardly industrial warrior Barron has mounted a chimera and is galloping through fog and ignorance with this battle cry: “We have invested over a half a billion dollars . . . There is zero chance that this will not happen.”

Woe to the humble sponge. Woe to the silent bacteria. Woe to the complex recycling process of life called the food chain. Woe to Trump should he ever find out that he, too, is connected. 

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1. The seas are home to autotrophic bacteria, which create organic matter from inorganic matter, pure alchemy in which life is created from non-life. Many of us would call that a miracle. Heterotrophic bacteria perform something a notch less spectacular: they render organic detritus — leftover bits of organic matter inaccessible to higher life-forms as nourishment — into a substance those life-forms can ingest. The bacteria do this by ingesting and thereby incorporating parts of that detritus into their own biomass, upon which mesofauna graze, thereby fueling the chain of life for another cycle. ↩︎
2. These tiny predators of bacteria compose a group of invertebrate animals (such as mites, nematodes, or centipedes) that are usually 0.1 mm to 2 mm in length. They live in the benthos, that is to say, at or in the bottom of the sea, especially in the deep parts of oceans. ↩︎
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/climate/trump-seabed-mining.html ↩︎
4. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/15/trumps-critical-minerals-drive-paves-the-way-for-a-deep-sea-gold-rush.html ↩︎
5. The work was conducted for the Disturbance and Recolonization (DISCOL) experiment in 1989 in a region of the Peru Basin at a depth of 2.5 miles, study site 7 04.4’ S, 88 27.60’ W. https://www.geomar.de/en/news/article/simulierter-manganknollen-abbau-beeintraechtigt-die-oekosystemfunktion-von-tiefseeboeden ↩︎
6. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/climate/trump-seabed-mining.html ↩︎
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-SC6B2rXG8 ↩︎
8. https://investors.metals.co/news-releases/news-release-details/metals-company-apply-permits-under-existing-us-mining-code-deep ↩︎