“…Recently, the bottom fauna of the Kuril Basin and the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench were studied by the Russian-German SokhoBio (Sea of Okhotsk Biodiversity Studies) expedition (2015) and the German-Russian KuramBio II (Kurile-Kamchatka Biodiversity Studies II) expedition (2016). The main goal of these expeditions was to study the species composition and distribution patterns of bottom animals, as well as to assess the faunal relationships in the deep-sea ecosystems of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench separated by such a natural barrier as the Kuril Islands Brandt et al, 2019). As a result, numerous species from different taxonomic groups of animals were described, the composition of macro-and meiofauna and the patterns of distribution of the main taxonomic groups of animals were studied, the faunal relationship and levels of endemism of these deep-sea areas were estimated (e.g., Maiorova, 2018, 2019;Alalykina, 2018;Brandt et al, 2018Brandt et al, , 2019Polyakova, 2018, 2019;Fukumori et al, 2018Fukumori et al, , 2019Kamenev, 2018aKamenev, ,b, 2019Kamenev, , 2020Maiorova and Adrianov, 2018a,b;Brandt, 2018, 2020;Mironov et al, 2018Mironov et al, , 2019bBorisanova and Chernyshev, 2019;Brandão et al, 2019;Mordukhovich et al, 2019;Schmidt et al, 2019;Alalykina and Polyakova, 2020;Maiorova and Adrianov, 2020;Saeedi and Brandt, 2020).…”