Strange world

Sea pig

Chapter 25: Xenophyophore

page 343: undersea mountains, abyssal plains. Deeper still are trenches, which teem with microscopic life forms.

page 344: seabed sediment also holds radioactive iron ejected by a supernova 2.2 million years ago and preserved in the fossilized remains of bacteria.

page 344:  Dali painting. See image above.

page 349: Julian Barbour [suggests] time does not flow like a stream.  Lee Smolin says we need a new starting point for explaining the directionality of time. A friendly critic responds here.

page 350: perhaps...it is matter itself that is truly astonishing.  John Gray writes:

Even if there are such things as laws of nature, there's no reason to think they must be accessible to the human mind. What science suggests is the opposite. If our minds evolved by natural selection as Darwin proposed, shaped more by a struggle for survival than by any search for truth, it's highly unlikely that we'll ever fully understand the universe. Almost certainly the world is a far stranger place than humans can possibly imagine.

This is the twenty-sixth in a new series of notes and comments on chapters in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It appears around the time of the US publication, and adds to an earlier series that appeared around UK publication.

Kraken

The first genetic study of global giant squid populations shows that the mysterious animals are very similar to each other even though they live so far apart. The finding suggests that their young are dispersed thousands of kilometres by powerful global currents.

-- report, paper

29,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The ocean floor is home to 2.9×10²⁹ single-celled organisms — that's 10 million trillion microbes for every human on the planet — but vast though it is, this figure is only 8% of the previous estimate of 35.5×10²⁹

-- report 

Only 8% of the previous estimate is still plenty (!) and it exists alongside and/or interacts with/supports a huge amount of larger life even in the coldest darkest places. In Antarctic benthos, for example, researchers have found the Polychaete worm Spiophanes tcherniai  at densities 150,000 to 180,000 per square metre. (Hat tip DSN)

Black iron snail

A scaly foot sea snail from the Dragon Vent. The scales are covered with layers of pure pyrite and iron sulphide.

Gaia's body

A newish detail from the deep:

huge currents hundreds of kilometres wide... picks up material from the vents and transports it long distances. In this way, large swaths of the ocean that would otherwise be bereft of life-giving nutrients - like those emanating from this black-smoker chimney - get fertilised.

-- report, paper

Deep dive

I wrote in an earlier post that few creatures are as strange as the Ediacarian biota. One candidate may be Paleodictyon nodosum (perhaps a xenophyophore). The only known visible feature associated with this being:

consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. [Peter A. Rona] has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.


Dr Rona's inability to catch the creature itself means that even though scientists have given it the fossil’s name, they still vigorously debate what it is. The main question is whether the hexagonal patterns are burrows or body parts, vacant residences or animal remains.

-- from Diving deep for a living fossil.

Incredible crinoids

From NOAA via Deep Sea News:

Written in the bones

On a human timescale, there is no sustainable harvest of [giant deep water corals]. We know next to nothing about how they spawn, settle and regenerate, but I have seen very few younger and smaller colonies, so even slow regeneration might not be a very likely option...

Given their slow growth [however], we may be able to use them as high-resolution records of past climate change.

-- Brendan Roark quoted here in reference to this paper.

See also this 2008 note on an earlier study.

On old corals in shallow waters see Marine Methuselahs.

In slime we trust

I spent a little time last week at the final meeting of HERMES, a Europe-wide research project on the deep seas, where participants delight in such wonders as 'holothurian heaven': 'meadows' more than 3,000 metres down near canyons of Martian proportions off the Portuguese coast.

One for the nerds, you might think. But I'll push a connection to global ethics and the future of life.

The columnist Thomas Friedman sometimes approaches Jade Goody in lack of self-awareness, but he also channels sensible if not very original thoughts every now and then. This from a column titled The Inflection is Near?:

We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

And in today's FT Amartya Sen reminds 'Anglo-Saxon' financiers, and others, that Adam Smith believed that "humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others", and warned against "prodigals and projectors" (on whom see John Stewart):

[Smith] wanted institutional diversity and motivational variety, not monolithic markets and singular dominance of the profit motive. [1]

Smith's Theory, written 100 years before Darwin's Origin was published, is worth attention in re-thinking the global economic system as if people and planet mattered. [2]

Diverse communities may be both a 'good thing' and have survival advantage. As work included within HERMES found, "ecosystem functioning and efficiency on continental margins increases exponentially in deep sea ecosystems characterised by higher biodiversity." [3]  So let's hear it for slime. [4]


Footnotes

[1] Adam Smith’s market never stood alone

[2] Acting as if re-foundation is really possible, and melt-down is avoidable.

[3] Exponential Decline of Deep-Sea Ecosystem Functioning Linked to Benthic Biodiversity Loss R. Danovaro et al.

[4] One could be almost serious: "Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to the human future than any of our hopes or plans" (Gray, 2002)

Good in itself

In chapter 8 of Cold Water Corals [1], the authors ground their case for conservation on four norms for a philosophy of conservation biology (re)formulated in the 1980s by Michael E. Soulé and others:

In struggling to ascribe present-day or future economic value to cold-water corals we run the risk of making poor valuations based on incomplete knowledge. In his 1985 paper ‘What is conservation biology?’ Soulé set out four so-called normative postulates to encapsulate the values underlying the ethics of conservation biology: (1) diversity of organisms is good, (2) ecological complexity is good, (3) evolution is good and (4) biotic diversity has intrinsic value. If we take Soulé’s advice then the work described in this book clearly shows that cold-water coral habitats deserve to be conservation priorities. We know that cold-water corals provide habitat to many other species. We know they form highly complex, beautiful structures that have captured the public’s attention making them a poster child for deep-sea conservation movements around the world. We know coral skeletons hold a unique archive of past ocean climate. We know that they have been damaged by bottom trawling and are threatened by climate change. Where there remain doubts, society needs to weigh the short-term benefits of our present-day activities, be they fishing, mining or combustion of fossil fuels, against the loss to future generations of habitats we are only beginning to understand.

[1] Cold-Water Corals: The Biology and Geology of Deep-Sea Coral Habitats by J. Murray Roberts, Andrew J. Wheeler, André Freiwald and Stephen Cairns. Cambridge, May 2009.

Image: Bubblegum coral (NZ)

A global stomach

Chiasmodon niger, or the black swallower -- a deep-sea fish that can extend its stomach to three times its size to swallow fish that are larger than itself -- is one of hundreds "bipolar" species spanning between the polar regions.

A BBC report has more detail. One possible explanation may be that:

the deep ocean at the poles falls as low as -1C (30F), but the deep ocean at the equator might not get above 4C (39F).

There is continuity in the ocean as a result of the major current systems...; a lot of these animals have egg and larvae stages that can get transferred in this water.

I'm a fan

Deep Sea News celebrates the deepest known sea fan, 5,850 meters down.

P.S. I was lucky enough once to spend a few hours with Stephen Cairns, one of those who identified this sea fan. He had, among other things, recently completed research which pointed to a correlation between the diversity of modern deep sea corals and shallow tropical ones.

Oldest animal

I didn't know this:

the oldest [known] animal in the oceans is a 4000-year-old cold-water coral.

-- the redoubtable J. Murray Roberts.

More than slime

We were looking for pretty animals that have eyes, are coloured, or glow in the dark; instead, the most interesting find was the organism that was blind, brainless, and completely covered in mud.

-- says Mikhail "Misha" Matz, who thinks the giant protists' bubble-like structure is probably one of the planet's oldest body designs, and may have existed for 1.8 billion years. (BBC report here. Richard Dawkins posts a Discovery report here )

These beings, which have 'a number of openings all over the body act as mouths and outlets for waste', are about 3cm across. Their cousins [?] the Xenophyophores, can be 20cm across.

P.S. 2 Dec: NYT

A problem without a name

'Ocean oxygen deprivation', says Ralph Keeling, is the best phrase he has come up with so far to describe the diminution of dissolved oxygen in large areas of the oceans resulting from large-scale, rapid dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere [1]. The impacts on ocean life, said Keeling (speaking at Malente XVII), are likely to be adverse and significant [2].

Keeling invited ideas for a term that would better communicate the nature of the phenomenon. I asked what he thought of 'ocean suffocation' -- arguably a sensational term, but no more so than 'ocean acidification' (which actually refers to a reduction in oceanic alkalinity) [3]. Keeling said he had thought about this, but thought it might excessively sensational. He wanted to hear from biologists [4].


Footnotes

[1] As a result of anthropogenic emissions, CO2 levels are way outside the normal range for at least the last several hundred thousand years, and increasing at least a hundred times faster than at any time during that period.

[2] He referred to Expanding Oxygen-Minimum Zones in the Tropical Oceans by L. Stramma et al. DOI: 10.1126/science.1153847. A news report here.

[3] P.S. 22 Oct: I created a wiki stub for 'ocean suffocation'. On 23 Oct, following discussion with some distinguished oceanographers, this was changed to ocean deoxygenation. 24 Oct: see also this post from Simon Donner at Maribo.

[4] Keeling also said he thought research into the consequences of deep ocean dumping of CO2, "where it may do less damage", should be on the scientific research agenda (although not necessarily on the political agenda) . He couldn't see why it was not as good or better than most options on the table. [For an overview of ocean sequestration see, for example, the ocean acidification network.] In response, Philip Chris Reid was emphatically doubtful, pointing to the rich benthic life that would be affected. A Dutch participant (whose name I missed) highlighted what he said were enormous uncertainties regarding how thousands of microbial species in the oceans, many of them dormant, would react, and suggested that the changes [already underway] might be comparable those of 55 million years ago (I presume he meant the PETM). Sylvia Earle articulated similar concerns to both Reid and the second respondent ["We need to recognise that millions of years evolution and fine tuning have put us where we are with a functioning environment. We should do no harm and protect natural systems. In particular, we don’t know how to put them back together again"]. [See also Seibel and Fabry, 2003.] Keeling answered that to the extent deep ocean CO2 dumping was acute it would be localized, and to the extent it was widespread it was inevitable as the CO2 was heading for the deep oceans and much of that life was probably doomed anyway. Right now, by contrast, CO2 was being dumped into the "most sensitive" top layers of the oceans, and "we may do much better for fish [in the upper layers] by pumping [the CO2] deep"...“We have a global crisis at hand. All mitigation options need to be on the table to assess their merit. This includes less acceptable options such as CO2 sequestration in the deep sea. It may be a bad one but it may be the least bad one.”

From the vasty deep

Snailfish caught on video for the first time here. At 7,700 metres the pressure is 770 times atmospheric.

A bearer of foreign bodies

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings was having trouble with beings beginning with X until Tom Goreau suggested the xenophyophores, giant single celled organisms that build structures from their own excrement.

Most of these rarely discussed and poorly understood organisms, including Syringammina fragilissima live on the seabed; but at least one species, Occultammina profunda, is infaunal, burying itself in the sediment.

Earlier this month Zoltan Sylvester, a skeptical geologist, blogged on trace fossils called graphoglyptids that may encode the tracks left by Paleodictyon, an ancient infaunal xenophyophore. These are almost perfect honeycomb-like hexagonal patterns:


The patterns are so striking, he says, that it wouldn't be surprising if the uninformed were to seize on them as 'crop circles of the deep sea'. But the most widely accepted idea in the scientific community is that they are 'farming traces':

In other words, these guys (whatever they might be, nobody really knows) create well aerated open burrow systems a few millimeters below the sea floor, with multiple openings to the sediment surface, so that chemosynthetic bacteria move in to get the necessary oxygen to oxidize methane and hydrogen sulphide, their favorite food.

Through idle free-association a long way from science, xenophyphores put me in mind of the Dowager Empress, driven (in W G Sebald's account) to absorb all, so obsessed by death that she swallowed powdered pearl every morning as an elixir of invulnerability, and stifled her empire by trying to hold all still. But the association is vague and the differences are huge. Not least, Xenophyophores thrive abundantly while the Empress died of dysentery after eating a double helping of her favourite crab apple with clotted cream pudding.

The living rock

Erwan Roussel and colleagues help extend the known range of life with evidence suggesting that the sub-sea-floor biosphere extends to at least 1600 meters below the sea floor and probably deeper, with an upper temperature limit for prokaryotic life of at least 113°C (see this article, part of a special issue on microbial space in Science).

This would surely have pleased Imre Friedman.

Insubstantial organisms

Since Trieste's historic descent, a robot called Kaiko has explored more of the hadal zone, discovering a fragile, floating world of jelly life, insubstantial organisms that are able to exist only because the water is so still that currents don't tear them apart. On the very bottom Kaiko has glimpsed sea cucumbers, worms, and giant single-celled organisms up to twenty-five centimeters across, which feed on the slow rain of organic matter that sinks from the sunlit zone eleven kilometers overhead. Because deep trenches are often close to land, wood washed out to sea by typhoons and other severe storms contributes to this supply of falling food, so that at the very bottom of our world live worms and crustaceans that dine upon hearts of palms and other rainforest delicacies.

-- Tim Flannery

(Image: Rigid diving suit, Carmagnole brothers, 1882)