At 400 feet below the surface of the Southern Ocean there is a world, strange and different from any other, it is soft and dark. This is the womb of Antarctica. Here is life both bountiful and diversified. We see it in the spotlight of our remotely operated vehicle. In a snapshot of time we are witnesses to a strange array of creatures -- each frozen in the act of lifting themselves above the bottom. We drift above the benthic plane, their home, their always wet, always cold, sun-less universe. We see no boulders, no hard lines, but rather a flat, somewhat grainy floor, a delicate matrix composed of finely flaked rock from the ground bones of ancient mountains crushed by countless glaciers on their slow and majestic journey to the sea. The flimsy chips are mixed with generations of tiny skeletons, invisible to our eyes, no more than vague memories of small lives past, buried in a never-ending accumulation of marine snow. We are in the storm! Tiny white specks rain down at sharp angles: soft bodies, empty husks, minute fecal pellets and hapless light-loving plankton in their last moments of life. This is the feast, to be pluck from the water or sucked from the soft rubble, neglected treasures falling from the world of light above, the world of whales, seals, and penguins, scraps and offal from the dinning table of krill and copepods. But too, this strange stage is a refuge and retreat from the dangerous illumination that guides the rapid motion of deadly jaws driven by voraceous appitites. Nimble and many-legged we see the krill as they dance across the bottom, gently hoovering, leaving no tracks, almost invisible, blotted patterns of muted colors slowly drifting across the same. The ubiquitous krill, keystone species of the Southern Ocean, it is the basis of life for all residences and transients with backbones in one way or another. It is this humble, precious creature that is featured in today’s photo, perhaps the last day of its life for soon it must return to the sunlit water to feed. No humble servant this, fighting in the dark for the scraps from its master’s table! They roam these waters in their billions grazing upon the vast fields of phytoplankton, preyed upon by all things larger. But this too is good, shredded or partially digested they rain down as part of the snow, as part of the storm, as part of the eternal cycle that is the Southern Ocean.