By Susan Milius
A newly discovered deep-sea creature has the body of a crab—except with long, fluffy, blonde hair covering its legs.
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It lives some 2,200 meters deep in the southeast Pacific near hydrothermal vents, says Joe Jones of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. The hair is so heavily infested with as-yet-unidentified bacteria that Jones and his colleagues speculate that the microbes are metabolizing compounds from the vents and providing energy for the crab.