A minute new species of Saccammina (monothalamous Foraminifera; Protista) from the abyssal Pacific

Saccammina minimus sp. nov., a spherical agglutinated organism presumed to be a foraminiferan, is described from the Kaplan Central site in the abyssal eastern Equatorial Pacific (5042 m water depth). The new species is minute in size (32 μm of samples collected at the KC site. In six subcores (6.6 cm2 surface area, 0–1 cm layer) from two cores obtained during a single deployment of a multiple corer, it represented 59% of all stained foraminifera in the samples. However, it had an extremely patchy small-scale distribution on a scale of centimetres; for example, 3, 285 and 1090 specimens were extracted from three subcores. A separate study has reported similar patterns among other minute indeterminate monothalamous foraminifera at the Kaplan East site (4032–4089 m water depth) located to the east, c. 1200 km from our study site. The reason for these very patchy distributions is not clear.