Aliens of the Deep
31/08/2007
JAMSTEC, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth science and Technology, has its own SF club, and Tetsuya Miwa, from the Extremobiospheres Research Center (or XBR), is the president.
In the workshop which he chaired this afternoon, the boundaries between science and science fiction blurred in more than one sense.
The deep ocean has always seemed as alien to me as outer space, and it’s about as difficult to explore. Its inhabitants give most science fiction writers a run for their money. But footage of living deep-sea critters is still relatively rare and we are discovering new details all the time. For example, did you know that certain deep-sea squid have one red and one green eye? The green eye looks permanently into the abyss. And if you look at living fish under UV light, they reveal the most amazing patterns, implying that they see their world differently than we suspected. But these organisms are fragile: dead fish reveal little. To find out more about them we have to either go down there, or bring them up to us.
JAMSTEC does both: its (now missing) remote controlled vessel ‘Kaiko’ found amphipods at the bottom of the Mariana Trench at over 10,000 m deep, and the manned submersible ‘Shinkai 6500’ descends down to (guess what) 6,500m to collect specimens. Not only do these guys keep deep sea fish alive in hyperbaric chambers for up to three months, they establish tissue cultures.
And if you think that’s easy, think again. HeLa cells shrivel up at 300Atm, because the cytoskeleton crumbles. Enzyme binding is affected and calcium/sodium channels blunt under pressure. Cells can’t metabolize or signal in hyperbaric conditions without special adaptations. And it cuts both ways. (Saying that, I don’t see where they are going with the molecular research, because links are either restricted or in Japanese. Grrr.)
If you leave behind the conventional deep sea critters—as bizarre as they are—and venture into microbial ecologies, things get weirder still. By now most of us are familiar with the hydrothermal vents and the fantastic assemblies of organisms associated with them, including 3m long tube worms living in symbiotic relationship with chemotrophic bacteria.
But there are weirder things still.
Hyperslime—or rather HyperSLiME—is a technical term. It stands for ‘hyperthermophilic subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystem’. This sort of thing may have been the cradle of all life on Earth. Quite aside from the outrageous chemistry involved, pay attention to the subsurface bit. The research vessel DV ‘Chikyu’ is equiped to drill down into the upper mantle; and to look for subsurface microbes is part of its mission.
I leave it here. I have to go and get some air.
Denni
September 21st, 2007 at 20:01
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