Wait…what? What kind of mad science is this?

What you need to know is that the deep oceans, encompassing depths below 200 m, cover most of Earth and are especially food-deprived systems. Primary production of carbon is minimal only occurring through alternative pathways such as chemosynthesis. However, chemosynthesis is a tiny fraction of total ocean production (0.02–0.03%) and the energy that sustains most deep-sea organisms is sequestered in sinking particulate organic carbon derived from plankton hundreds of meters to kilometers above near the sea surface. At the abyssal seafloor, this sinking particulate organic carbon represents less than 1% of surface production.

This minimal amount of carbon available opens the door for more unique sources of carbon. Enter food falls and aligators.

The remains of large plants, algae, and animals arrive as bulk parcels that create areas of intense food enrichment. Deep-sea scientists have explored these food falls through both naturally occurring and experimentally deployed wood (#woodfall) and plant remains, cameras baited with animal carcasses, chance occurrences of and deployed intact whale carcasses several miles deep on the seafloor. These experimental and natural food falls have revealed the important role they play in deep-sea diversity. Many of these large food falls on the deep-sea floor, host highly diverse and endemic suites of organisms in kind of food island. In addition, food falls may represent significant transport highways of carbon into the deep oceans. For example, during Typhoon Morakot, wood was estimated to carry a total of 4*10¹² g of organic carbon into the oceans, nearly 25% of the total annual riverine discharge of organic carbon in the same region. On the deep-sea floor, a single wood fall can enrich sedimentary organic carbon by >25% even after several years.

But why alligators? With regard to animal falls, prior work as focused primarily on whales and other cetaceans, pinnipeds, large fish such as tuna, and elasmobranchs. However, it very likely that marine reptiles both currently, and even prehistorically, are an important source of carbon in the deep oceans. Before the existence of whales, perhaps large marine reptiles like ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, and plesiosaurs hosted diverse and endemic invertebrate communities on sunken carcasses, similar to modern-day whale falls, and contributed significantly to the deep-sea carbon budget. From ichthyosaur and plesiosaur remains, there is evidence of molluscs that are also associated with Eocene seeps. A fossilized limpets are also found in close association with the bones of a fossil leatherback turtle from the Middle Eocene. In the modern oceans, carcasses of Alligator mississippiensis serve as the closest modern analog of ichthyosaur, mosasaur, plesiosaur food falls.

Alligator carcasses in the deep ocean are also not as nearly impossible as you might think.  Both live individuals and carcasses of alligators are frequent on beaches and in coastal surf.  A 3-meter individual came ashore at Folly Beach, South Carolina in 2014 and in 2016 a carcass of a 4-meter individual washed up on a beach in Galveston, Texas.  These individuals of A. mississippiensis may be easily carried offshore by major rivers or during large storm events, tropical storms, and hurricanes.  Live A. mississippiensis have been observed 30 kilometers offshore and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, an alligator was found 25 kilometers offshore. During the 2011 Mississippi flood event, several dead alligators were observed in the mouth of Atchafalaya River.

Thus, I am on ship, 100’s of kilometers from shore, placing an alligator 2 kilometers deep on the seafloor.

*The three alligators were culled by the state of Louisiana to control population numbers and in aid of restoration efforts. The alligator carcasses were then permitted to us for scientific use. The conservation and any taking of alligators in Louisiana is a very serious and thorough process. You can read more about the conservation success story that is alligators in Louisiana here https://t.co/LQskiPyg6e.

The post Alligators in the Abyss first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In honor of Hagfish Day at WhaleTimes.org, I am reposting a Kevin Z original classic from the days of yore.

Lyrics under the fold:

Every Whale Has A Bone (with apologies to Brett Michael)

We both sink silently still in the dead of the sea
Although we both sink down together
We get nipped on by sharks
Was it somewhere I swam or something i did
Should I have tried to put up a fight
Though I tried to protect you
We both died But I guess that’s why they say

(Chorus)
Every whale has its bone
Just like hagfish slimes everyone
Just like every boneworm will eat me till I’m gone
Every whale has its bone ………..

My flesh is picked off clean as I lay on the seafloor
I hear the king crab and hagfish rasp my flesh off some more
But I wonder if that isopod
Thinks I taste just like a cod
And I know those roots digging right in
Its that bone worm sucking out my lipid

Chorus

(Bridge)
Though it’s been a while now
My bones they still decay
like an endless source of food
My whale fall community remains….

Now I’m covered in osedax, surrounded by bacteria
Instead of swimming in Hawaii, I’m down here rotting away uh
And now I hear a 6-gill coming too
To rip the last piece of flesh off oooooo
But to smell the gas, that sulphide
Rips me up inside and that why i guess

Chorus

The post #HagfishDay: Every Whale Has Its Bone first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Whale Fall (after life of a whale) from Sharon Shattuck on Vimeo.

The post When a Whale Dies, The Story Has Just Begun first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Early on, Osedax was only found on whale bones from carcasses that sank into the abyss. It wasn’t long before researchers started a long and productive string of experiments placing whale bones (and the entire carcass of stranded whales) out in the deep sea to study the evolution of the community supported entirely on dead whale.

Footage of whale fall succession in the deep sea produced by the lab of Dr. Craig Smith, University of Hawaii.

Immediately, and with good reason, it was thought that Osedax was clearly a whale-fall specialist. The core of whale bones consists of a matrix rich in lipids – up to 60 percent! – an organic manna from the sunlit heavens. University of Hawai’i researcher Dr. Craig Smith estimates that a 40 ton whale carcass sinking to the deep sea contains about 2 million grams of organic carbon in its tissues and bones (Smith & Baco 2003). For each square meter of the seafloor that the carcass affects, it supplies the equivalent of over 100 years of carbon from the rain of marine snow that falls to the seafloor from dead surface plankton!

Recently, other researchers challenged this conventional wisdom. To characterize the extent of what these strange worms can live on, they started deploying other substrata than whale bones in the deep sea. Initially, Osedax was found living on cow bones (Jones et al. 2008), but the argument was proposed that this was an unnatural environment in the deep-sea and would therefore be of a minscule contribution to Osedax habitat and nutrition. Only a few months later Vrijenhoek and colleagues (2008) replied with a report of Osedax on ungulate bones that were likely galley waste thrown over from fishing or shipping vessels, suggesting:

“With numerous fishing, commercial transport, passenger and military vessels sailing the world’s oceans, we wonder how frequently bones from galley waste might reach the ocean floor. We do not suggest that such bones provide a more bountiful and temporally stable resource for Osedax than large cetacean carcasses, but every food fall may help these bone-eating worms continue to flourish in a world that now has fewer large whales.”

But cows are ungulates… and ungulates – like whales – are mammals. Mammalian vertebrae are generally rich in lipids. A real smoking gun for the specialization of wHaLe BoNe-DeVoUrInG zOmBiE wOrM fRoM TEH ABYSS!!1!! would be to find it happily perched upon the bones of non-mammalian taxa, for instance marine reptiles or fish. Previous studies of fish falls in the deep sea were carried out on time scales likely too short for Osedax to colonize or be detected with imagery. Nonetheless, Glover and colleagues suggested that for most fish or small carcass remains

“… the likelihood of many of the small bones being scavenged or settling into the sediment, suggests that there would be little available bone material left after three to four weeks.”

So like any good scientist out there to prove their instinct correct, Drs. Greg Rouse, Robert Vrijenhoek and colleagues went out to collect data deploying an experimental array of fish bones and calcified shark cartilage into the depths of Monterey Canyon. 157 days later, the array was recovered and lo and behold Osedax had colonized the largest bones! Not only do they appear to colonize any bones and suck them dry of their precious, juicy lipids, but they do it pretty swiftly.

The real kicker is that these fishy Osedax were colonized by 3 different species (2 undescribed, nicknamed “yellow patch” and “nude palp E” <-scandalous!). One specimen of Osedax roseus had already started spawning eggs suggesting that they grow, mature and spawn rapidly after settling on a bone – in less than 7 months. This last point is of particular interest because previous genetic studies have found that Osedax populations are very diverse with high effective population sizes. What this means for the species is that there must be many breeding individuals down in the deep sea.

This finding helps to solve a paradox in Osedax research. How can the worm persist in huge numbers on a resource (whale falls) that is so highly variable in time and space? They would either need a massive reproductive output or the whale-fall habitat would need to be very common. This is complicated by Osedax‘s life-history variables, some known and some not: it must acquire it’s symbiont, grow, recruit dwarf males, mature, convert bone lipids into egg mass and spawn – all while this resource persists. Whale bones may be optimal habitat, but we know from decades of ecological study that animals have trade-offs. Fish bones may be less rich in lipids and persistence of Osedax habitat, but it certainly be preferable to starving to death in the freezing cold, dark, lonely depths!

By colonizing a wider variety of bone types, Osedax opens up many more habitat possibilities and may help explain how in the vast expanse of the planet’s largest (and some might say grandest) environment such an unusual lifestyle could evolve and persist.

References:

Glover AG, Kemp KM, Smith CR, & Dahlgren TG (2008). On the role of bone-eating worms in the degradation of marine vertebrate remains. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 275 (1646), 1959-1961 PMID: 18505721

Jones WJ, Johnson SB, Rouse GW, & Vrijenhoek RC (2008). Marine worms (genus Osedax) colonize cow bones. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, 275 (1633), 387-391 PMID: 18077256

Rouse GW, Goffredi SK, Johnson SB, & Vrijenhoek RC (2011). Not whale-fall specialists, Osedax worms also consume fishbones. Biology letters PMID: 21490008

Smith CR, Baco AR (2003). Ecology of whale falls at the deep-sea floor. Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review 41:311-354.

Vrijenhoek, R., Collins, P., & Van Dover, C. (2008). Bone-eating marine worms: habitat specialists or generalists? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275 (1646), 1963-1964 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.0350

The post Whale Bone-Devouring Worm Into More Than Just Whales first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Shannon Johnson and colleagues describe two new species of this strange new AWESOME BONE SNAIL! Rubyspira osteovora (bone devourer – though they should have translated ‘boneworm devourer” instead…) and Rubyspira goffrediae (named after the talented microbiologist Dr. Shana Goffredi) lives near the whale falls in Monterrey Canyon. They appear to be closely related to other deep-sea snails, including hydrothermal vents ones. Interestingly, there are in the Abyssochrysoid group which has fossil members that were found to be in association with marine reptile and mysticete bone remains and fossil cold seeps.

While taxonomically very similar and living close together, the two new species of Rubyspira differ in their microhabitat and how they acquire nutrition. R. osteovora lives in the sediment near whale bones and has a very short, but broad, radula, possibly to scrape up bone fragments from the sediments. On the other hand, R. goffrediae lives on the bone and has a long, spiky radula, thought to be able to break apart intact bone.

Bone fragments and minerals were also found in each species guts. Furthermore, stable isotope signatures of carbon and nitrogen also match a diet based upon whale bone, including the bone-eating worm Osedax, which have a ‘root’-like system that can rapidly degrade bones, using the lipids as a nutritional source. While there is little direct evidence of feeding on Osedax roots, the lipid rich bone fragments containing the organic remnants of the Osedax ‘roots’ may have been the niche the bone snail was looking for.

Johnson SB, Warén A, Lee RW, Kano Y, Kaim A, Davis A, Strong EE, & Vrijenhoek RC (2010). Rubyspira, new genus and two new species of bone-eating deep-sea snails with ancient habits. The Biological bulletin, 219 (2), 166-77 PMID: 20972261

The post Move Over Boneworm, the Bone Snail is Taking Over first appeared on Deep Sea News.

This one goes out to David from my lab who just got back from 2 months down under in Antarctica and deployed whale bones for part of his experiments. You can read up on all his updates while he was at sea.

Every Whale Has A Bone (with apologies to Brett Michael)

We both sink silently still in the dead of the sea
Although we both sink down together
We get nipped on by sharks
Was it somewhere I swam or something i did
Should I have tried to put up a fight
Though I tried to protect you
We both died But I guess that’s why they say

(Chorus)
Every whale has its bone
Just like hagfish slimes everyone
Just like every boneworm will eat me till I’m gone
Every whale has its bone ………..

My flesh is picked off clean as I lay on the seafloor
I hear the king crab and hagfish rasp my flesh off some more
But I wonder if that isopod
Thinks I taste just like a cod
And I know those roots digging right in
Its that bone worm sucking out my lipid

Chorus

(Bridge)
Though it’s been a while now
My bones they still decay
like an endless source of food
My whale fall community remains….

Now I’m covered in osedax, surrounded by bacteria
Instead of swimming in Hawaii, I’m down here rotting away uh
And now I hear a 6-gill coming too
To rip the last piece of flesh off oooooo
But to smell the gas, that sulphide
Rips me up inside and that why i guess

Chorus

The post Every Whale Has Its Bone first appeared on Deep Sea News.

“Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon,” he said.

“And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that’s removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere.”

He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air.

“And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean.

“If they die where it’s deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years.”

Pershing’s solution is to offer a trading scheme similar to carbon credit trading. Whaling nations can receive good carbon karma for not whaling or whaling less. I haven’t seen the talk nor read a paper on this so do not feel qualified to opine on this matter. The troubling aspect to me is the general idea sinking things to the deep-sea is a great way to solve problems. Out of sight, out of mind right?

What happens to a whale after it sinks to the seafloor? Let’s review!

Figure 1: Whale Death Cycle. Some images from If Its Hip, Its Here, Craig Smith (U. Hawaii) and MBARI.

But, let a wee bit closer look at those bones, looks like some fuzzy stuff on them.

Figure 2: Osedax, only discovered in 2004, now has more than a dozen species described. Figure from Vrijenhoek et al. 2009 in BMC Biology (open access).

BOO YA!! Bone-eating zombie worms from hell in your eyez!! All your precious carbon, locked away in the forbidden depths of the abyss, still gets recycled. I don’t know how long it takes, but eventually, some point in time, some of that carbon will get released back into shallower waters through gametes broadcast upwards or upwelling of currents. Some will get buried, but in millions of years as the plates shift and subducted, what was once laying on the seafloor will be crushed and melted come out of a volcano. Should we be worried? Probably not, but I bet his calculations don’t take into account release of carbon through decomposition on the seafloor. Not mention that the release of the lipids from whale bone creates a sort of mini-seep around the skeleton which generates methane, another greenhouse gas.

The real problem with whaling is the destruction of this important habitat – the Whale Fall habitat. Every whale removed from the ocean is an ecosystem LOST to a unique and diverse community in the deep sea. A stepping stone connecting disparate populations LOST. A novel metabolic pathway or potential new drug discovery LOST. An important undiscovered species that may hold a key insight into the evolution of its group LOST. In 2009, Japan harvested 680 whales – 680 rare, long-lived, nutrient-recycling ecosystems LOST. Won’t someone think of the poor, little bone-eating worms and all the other unique animals that rely on whale carcasses for their home?

(Hat tip to a crazy drunken Irishmen for the inspiration.)

The post Won’t They Think of the Poor Bone-Eating Worms? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The post Dead Whales…The People Who Study Them and The Worms That Eat Them first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I am standing in the back of a large lorry, my feet submerged in a pool of blood, water and oil. The truck’s container is open to a grey Welsh sky, but with high-sided walls to keep the blood and us hidden from view. I shout instructions to Nick, my PhD student, over the wind and rain: “Just climb on to its back and start cutting!” He looks doubtful. Our task lies stinking before us – a nine-metre whale corpse freshly pulled from the Bristol Channel.

Adrian Glover writes an excellent essay covering the awe and joy of deep-sea science and cutting up dead whales at the New Statesmen

The post Chopping Up Whales For Science! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

If you don’t know already know, hermaphrodites have lady bits and man bits.  Or in dryer language an individual with both male and reproductive organs.  Hermaphrodites can be either  synchronous or sequential, i.e. both sexes occur at the same time or the individual changes sex during their lifespan.  More dude was a lady than dude looks like lady.

Again because we like to name and group, sequential hermaphrodites are further divided into protogynous and protandrous.  The former for when the female comes first in the sequence and the later for when the male comes first.   This requires a full transformation of the gonads.  The sequential hermaphrodite possesses the genetic blueprint to produce both sexual bits.  Environment cues trigger which genes express themselves. Express yourself, [you’ve got to make him], Express himself, Hey, hey, hey, hey, So if you want it right now, make him show you how, Express what hes got, oh baby ready or not

Hermaphrodiitism is rare in mammals and birds and probably explains why they are really boring.  In fish and invertebrates on the other hand, hermaphroditism ccurs in high frequency.  Clown fish, those cute little fish promoted by Disney…protandrous hermaphrodites.  Does the conservative right know Disney is promoting hermaphroditism?

A recent study adds another species to the list.  Work by Tyler et al. finds that Idas washingtonia, a deep-sea clam, is a protandric hermaphrodite.  Idas is a small clam found inhabiting dead whale carcasses on the deep-sea floor.  So what triggers the switch from male to female? 6mm.

At ~6mm males, males lose the man bits and gain some lady bits. Then begins formation of unfertilized eggs.  Apparently, not many males make 6mm and become female.  That’s reserved for a lucky 12%.

Tyler, P., Marsh, L., Baco-Taylor, A., & Smith, C. (2009). Protandric hermaphroditism in the whale-fall bivalve mollusc Idas washingtonia Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, 56 (19-20), 1689-1699 DOI: 10.1016/j.dsr2.2009.05.014

The post Who likes protandric hermaphrodites? first appeared on Deep Sea News.