Navy Seals*

*Navy Seals, actually Sea Lions.

Yeah, you read that right. The newest plan in Homeland Security? Magical Marine Mammals. The government started training Sea Lions and Dolphins to help “foil terrorism.”

In this article, writers describe a sea lion taking “less than a minute to find a fake mine under a pier near San Fransisco’s AT&T Park.”

(Image Source)

A dolphin located a terrorist lurking in the murky waters and another sea lion, using a device he carried in his mouth, cuffed the faux-terrorist’s ankle so that the authorities could “real him in.”

The animals are known as “Navy Marine Mammals” and are based in San Diego. More than 3,000 responders participate in anti-terrorism training exercises started by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2004. The Navy’s special animals stole the show this year. The drills at the anti-terrorism training include fake bomb explosions, a hijacking of container ships, and other California-centered disasters.

So why marine mammals?

Tom LaPuzza, spokeman for the Navy Marine Mammals program said this on the subject “Security is of vital importance and humans are very slow in the water. Sea lions can see five times as well. And dolphins can use their sonar to spot items that would take humans days or weeks to find.”

Apparently this program is nothing new, LaPuzza says Dolphins and sea lions were used during both the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. (Though, since Iraq is primarily land locked, I’m not entirely sure how big of an influence our marine mammal friends had on the war effort).

To all the animal rights supporters out there, don’t worry “None of the animals have been harmed in the anti-terrorist work. They never have to carry potentially catastrophic mines.” The article goes on to site that instead of having the animals carry the mines, they find them and place markers so that highly trained Navy divers can retrieve and defuse the devices. Well, good?

Okay, so I know that this isn't really science in the "look at this groundbreaking discovery" sense, or even in the "things you should know about your body/planet/environment/universe that you don't actually know" sense... but it's kind of cool right?

Right.

Multi-Cellular Life Thrives in a Permanent No-Oxygen Environment!

In my last post, I talked about the organisms that can, amazingly, thrive without any source of light. The deep sea is the home to hundreds of extremophiles (organisms that flourish in extreme environments) but recently, researches found something that puts even the chemosynthetic life on the hydrothermal vents to shame.

Scientists and researchers previously thought that only single-celled organisms could survive in the anoxic (oxygen deprived) areas of the deep ocean. Even when multi-cellular organisms were found in these areas, they were assumed to have sunk from the oxygen-filled waters of higher ocean zones.
Roberto Danovaro, et al, at BMC Biology discovered the first multi-cellular animals that survive in these zero oxygen environments. These organisms live and reproduce entirely without oxygen. Over the past ten years, Italian and Danish scientists sent multiple expeditions to collect sediment from the hypersaline anoxic basins of the Mediterranean Sea, located almost two miles below the ocean surface. Ecosystems like these are permanently devoid of oxygen and, until recently, have had completely unexplored biodiversity.

Danovaro and his team discovered that the sediments collected from the L’Atalante basin, are inhabited by three distinct multi-cellular species of the phylum Loricifera completely new to science. Although researchers don’t completely understand the biochemistry of these new organisms, they know that these organisms lack mitochondria (the organelle present in most animals cells and is sometimes called the cell’s “powerhouse”). Instead, these organisms seem to have organelles called hydrogenosomes that use anaerobic chemistry and are usually associated with endosymbiotic prokaryotes.

This first evidence of a complete life cycle for a multi-cellular organism in a no oxygen environment is very compelling. It also makes the idea of complex life forms on oxygen-free planets seem much less like a giant leap of faith and more like a distinct possibility.

(For more information and for the original photos see BMC Biology.)

Hydrothermal Vents: The Key to Life On and Off the Earth?

For countless years, scientists believed the assumption that all the life on Earth was based on ecosystems with photosynthetic organisms (organisms getting energy from sunlight) as their foundation. Even the deep sea creatures that managed to survive in the pitch black zones of the ocean were thought to depend on sun-based food webs. And while it’s true that many deep sea organisms feed on small animals and falling debris from the ocean’s surface, in 1977 a group of scientists discovered an entirely new form of life.

The first hydrothermal vent (also known as a “black smoker”) was discovered in 1977 by the scientists of the Galapagos Reef Expedition. The scientists, who were mapping the bathymetry of the area’s seafloor, came upon the vent surrounded by giant tube worms about eight feet tall. It was an amazing discovery. Up until this point, sedentary organisms weren’t thought to be able to survive in the desolate ocean floor landscape. The seafloor was thought to be so bare, that the group didn’t even have a biologist with them on the expedition.

When Robert Ballard, the Co-Chief Scientist of the historical expedition spoke at a class of mine in college, he said that when they brought the worm back to the surface, they had to confiscate all the alcohol of everyone on the vessel in order to preserve the sample. (No biologist equals no formaldehyde.) The only way to maintain the worm was to submerse it in high-proof liquor and, unfortunately for the members of the cruise, eight feet of worm takes a whole lot of vodka to preserve it. The remaining scientists, though not very pleased to lose their entertainment on the long research cruise, seemed happy to aid in the discovery. John Edmond, the geochemist on the expedition is quoted as saying “We were dancing off the walls…it was a discovery cruise…like Columbus.”

So, how did these miraculous worms survive? How did they even evolve? Well below the 1000 meter depth mark that bids goodbye to the last particles of light from the surface; their ecosystem was thriving despite the seemingly impossible conditions. As it turns out, their proximity to the hydrothermal vents was no coincidence. Here, miles below the surface, a new base to the food web had developed.

The smoking vents are actually towers of crystalline zinc sulfide, blowing sulfur-rich smoke that can reach temperatures of over 700 degrees F. This ecosystem relies not on the photosynthesis of the rest of the world but instead on special chemosynthetic bacteria. These bacteria are the base of the food web for the rest of the vent area, directly and indirectly feeding a whole myriad of species never before seen. Bright red tube worms, blind shrimp, and giant crabs are just some of the more than 300 specially evolved species that exist in these unique vent ecosystems. Geochemist Gisela Winckler says that, “Most of the deep ocean is like a desert, but these vents are oases of life and weirdness.”

The harsh smoke in the waters can have a pH as low as 2.8 (an acidity higher than table vinegar) and biologists have reported seeing “naked snails” that were unable to form their calcium

carbonate shell because of the harsh pH environment.

Despite the environment, these areas are some of the most fertile all the ocean, rivaling coral reefs with their levels of unique biodiversity thanks to the bacteria that feed on the seemingly noxious soup of chemicals spewing from the vents. Deep sea shrimps have been known to number in the millions near these vents.

Since they were discovered, hydrothermal vents have been a focus of origin of life studies. Chemosynthetic ecosystems like these may very well be where the first life on Earth developed. If life can exist in such harsh conditions on earth, could it exist elsewhere in the universe?

This is exactly what many scientists believe.

Jupiter’s ice moon Europa, which is commonly believed by planetary scientists to house a subsurface ocean is a likely candidate for hydrothermal vent activity due to the fact that the planet’s bulk composition is similar to Earth’s. Elsewhere in the Solar System, the Mars rover “Spirit” has been dragging one wheel around the surface of Mars for quite a few years. One of the gouges from the wheel revealed a mineral deposit on the Mars surface. Scientists believe that this mineral deposit was most likely caused by hydrothermal vent activity, implying that a large amount of water was present on the planet’s surface when the vent was active.

While not necessarily little green men, it’s still entirely plausible that since life exists on the desolate seafloor, that life exists in other seemingly impossible environments in our galaxy in the deep, dark reaches of space.

You just shouldn't expect to get abducted by a tube worm.

Though it might not be exactly what he meant, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.