Visitors: Because the water coming out of hydrothermal vents is toxic to most animals, there aren't many visitors to the real active parts of a hydrothermal vent environment. However, here on the Juan de Fuca Ridge the amount of venting water is constantly changing and sometimes an area can cool way off, but still have plenty of animals left behind. When this happens, "normal" deep sea animals can move into the area to feed on the deep-sea smorgasboard.

This octopus is not a specialized vent animal, but it does like to visit the clam beds and we think is feeding on the clams just like other octopuses can in shallow water.

The most common predator/scavenger that we see moving into a cooling site is this giant spider crab. We see these crabs on every dive, sometimes in among the tubeworms and often wandering the basalt around the edges of an active hydrothermal vent. Click here for a closer view.

We often see a few fishes swimming through the area. Quite a few different kinds seem to like to visit the vents, but only the vent fish really lives here. We don't know if the visiting fish eat much of anything when they visit the vents, but this is something we plan on finding out.

Rays are also commonly seen visitors in the area.

These are brittle stars. They can be found all over the ocean bottom, but we usually don't see four in a row as shown in this picture.