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Researchers learned that sessile invertebrates -- those that stay in one place, such as mussels and barnacles -- became more abundant during the study period, while seaweed species like kelps declined.

Studies of other kinds of deep-sea disturbances, including deep-sea trawling and oil and gas operations, have suggested that sessile animals are especially vulnerable, sometimes taking decades to recover.

But unlike most others in that group, it does not undergo metamorphosis from a free-swimming larva to a fixed-to-the-bottom, or sessile, adult.

But many coastal species are sessile – meaning they are stuck to rocks for all their adult lives.

Miller weaves an improbable but compelling theory of how his study of sessile sea squirts influenced the United States’ painful legacy of forced sterilization.