Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:As companies hunt for metals in the depths of the ocean, scientists are taking inventory of every species that lives there. Mining the deep sea involves a suction mechanisms that could disturb or injure local fauna with sediment plumes. So far, 788 species have been spotted, and there could be even more waiting in the dark. When a commercial deep-sea mining test was conducted on the abyssal plain of the Eastern Pacific in 2022, it found over 3,000 tons of metal. Some potentially impacted species may not have even been discovered yet, while many others were identified with DNA data.