A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
benthic
Of the bottom — the floor of a sea or lake and the community living on, in, or just above it. Benthic organisms include everything from corals and sponges anchored in place to worms and clams buried in sediment to crabs walking across it. The benthos is set against the pelagic realm of open water above it, and against the plankton drifting in that water.
Etymology
From Greek benthos, the depth of the sea, coined as a scientific term in 1891 by Ernst Haeckel, with the adjective following by about 1902. Haeckel was a prolific maker of words and several of his stuck permanently, including ecology, phylum, and plankton. Benthos is closely related to Greek bathos, depth, which supplies bathymetry and the batholith — so the deep sea and the deep granite are named from the same idea.
Notes
Most of the seafloor is benthic habitat, which makes it the largest single living space on the planet by area. Zones subdivide by depth: sublittoral out to the shelf edge, then bathyal, abyssal, and hadal in the trenches — hadal after Hades.