About a decade ago, Vivianne Solis-Weiss, a marine biologist at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México who studies marine worms, talked to a colleague studying seagrasses, flowering plants that grow in the ocean.

“‘Every time we gather the flowers, we see these small animals all over them,’” she recalls her colleague telling her. Both wondered why these little worms and tiny shrimp-like crustaceans would gather there. Could they be pollinating the plants—the marine equivalent of bees and butterflies?

Solis-Weiss and her colleagues hypothesized that the creatures might indeed play a role in ocean pollination and outlined their idea in a study, which appeared in the small journal Inter-Research Science Publisher in 2012.

“It was very hard to publish that first paper, because