And not to be confused with Marine Muesli. I know you’re disappointed.
Apparently, in addition to all things jelly, I’m fascinated by all things blobby. You’ll note the restraint I used in not posting anything about that blob they found floating off the coast of Alaska last summer. It seemed obvious right from the start that that was simply your run-of-the mill algal bloom. These blobs, on the other hand, would quite mystify me without the help of a reassuring National Geographic narrator.
I’m pretty sure this is the same stuff that builds up in the water you leave the dishes in the sink too long. Is it just me or did you also half-expect to see an eyeball or two floating around in one of those things?
It seems like this may be some sort of biofilm, which is a very sexy subject in the world of biology right now. Biofilms are essentially thin coats of bacteria and bacterial slime (technically known as extracellular polymeric substance, or EPS) on teeth, stream cobbles, catheters, lawyers, etc. (just kidding lawyers! Don’t sue!) These things are apparently everywhere — even on the thin skin of water at the surface of the ocean — and this way of life represents an up-till-now severely underappreciated bacterial lifestyle. 99 percent of bacteria may live in biofilms.
And yet these don’t seem like classic biofilms as they aren’t tightly packed or adhered to a surface. They seem to be somewhere in the no-man’s-land between a biofilm and marine snow, the slow rain of decaying microbial matter that eventually coats the ocean floor. Both marine snow and mucilages incorporate much more than just bacteria — like crustaceans, plankton and viruses. For whatever reason the marine snow in the northeastern Mediterranean is piling up faster than the life in the water column or on the sea floor can take it out. Which seems odd, because in the deep sea, the locals will quickly consume anything that isn’t ballistic-grade plastic, and I’m pretty sure they have their R&D departments working on that too.
Whatever they are, they are unusual, and probably prospering by climate change. I love weird manifestations of life, but there is good-weird and there is bad-weird. The kind of weird that smothers fish and spreads E. coli is definitely bad-weird.
For the PLoS paper that inspired this video, click here.
