Deep-sea denizens go years without food with clever biological fix

A pill bug dwelling under a garden pot curls its body into a tiny armored ball as self-defense. Far below the ocean surface, some of its much larger relatives face a harder problem: ​how to stay alive when the next meal may not come for years.

Those creatures are called deep-sea isopods, a group of crustaceans with flattened ‌and segmented bodies that, as new research reveals, have resolved the dilemma with a multifaceted biological fix....