Despite appearances, this is not a naughty present from a bachelorette party. It's a peanut worm from France, with its snout tucked inside. Creative Commons Pgrobe

Breaking news: Peanut worms are annelids. Great! I hear you saying. What’s a peanut worm? (And possible sub-questions: What’s an annelid? And why should I care?) Good questions.

Annelids are the bristled, segmented worms. That is, bristles and segments are the synapomorphies for this group, or the shared, derived characteristics that distinguish them from other groups. A synapomorphy makes their grouping both scientifically valid and evolutionarily based*.

To simplify the classic story: Long ago there was a worm that evolved two special new traits its ancestors lacked:  bristles and segments. This ancestral worm produced offspring that evolved into all the leeches, hydrothermal tubeworms, polychaete bristle worms, and giant Australian earthworms of the world. As descendants of that first innovative worm, they all have segments. And they all have bristles, although sometimes segments or bristles are hard to see — as in earthworms. They also have parapodia, stumpy little extensions of their body on which the bristles are located. And everyone lived happily ever after, until fish hooks were invented. The End.

Well, almost.

Sometimes, the descendants of a creature that develops a distinctive trait may lose this trait for reasons of evolutionary expedience, or simply because there’s no reason not to. These creatures can fool us into thinking they are *not* a member of the group in question. This often happens with parasites that “de-evolve” because they no longer have to make it on their own; I wrote earlier this year about how microsporidia are actually highly evolved fungi called zygomycetes. We earlier thought they were rather bare-bones parasitic microbes, but their loss of many of the zygomycetes’ unique (derived) characteristics initially fooled us. Well, this has apparently also happened to a quirky little group of marine organisms called peanut worms, or “Sipunculids”.

Possible future constituents of "Sipunculid Worm Jelly". As may be guessed, this is a Chinese delicacy. Creative Commons vmenkov. Click for link.

Peanut worms, like so many other strange but real Earth creatures, are Dr. Seussian in design. My favorite observer of biodiversity after David Attenborough, Colin Tudge, describes them thus:

The phylum Sipuncula includes about 320 species of astonishingly unprepossessing creatures, all marine, some roughly resembling sea cucumbers and others like sprouting potatoes, with their tentacled mouths at the end of the sprouts.

Here’s a picture of a potato-esque peanut worm, and here’s a tentacled snout.

They are called peanut worms because when they retract their long snouts (called introverts) and bunch up, they can look like unshelled peanuts. The peanut worm at the top of this post has its snout mostly retracted, and is a bit peanutty. Some peanut worms also have, and I am not making this up, a little calcareous “anal shield”. I am resisting making a crude joke here. There are several I could choose from and I bet you can guess several. I am being strong. Ahem. Like annelids, they also have trochophore larvae, a key character of the lophotrochozoan mother group (the sister of the skin-shedding ecdysozoa in the protostomes, or invertebrates).

Peanut worms have a number of interesting features which you can see drawn out here: a ringed brain, a long nerve cord (like other annelids), and a helical gut that twists back on itself, positioning the anus somewhat near the mouth. Some live in sediment; some crawl into abandoned shells like sand dollars, where they grow so big they can no longer get out; and some, incredibly, bore into rock. Not bad for a tentacled bag.

Like annelids, peanut worms also have a cuticle-coated epidermis, and two layers of muscle — an outer circular layer and an inner longitudinal layer. They have a true coelom (seel-um), or body cavity. Their skeleton acts on hydrostatic pressure, just like an earthworm. Also like annelids, they have a nuchal organ, or ciliated sensory pit, on their head. The mouth at the end of their snout is surrounded by ciliated tentacles and sometimes hooks. Some also have ocelli, or very simple eyes.

We have a few rare fossils of actual sipunculids from the Cambrian(see awesome photos buried in article) — 520 million years ago — and they look remarkably similar to modern peanut worms. Sharks(which have remained similar in for for a mere 420 million years): eat your hearts out. This just goes to show the pace of evolution varies in its own good time. Peanut worms surely evolved during all this time too. They just did so many times slower than uppity groups like vertebrates, because apparently there was little selective pressure to do so.

Amusingly, one of the earliest described species of peanut worm was named Golfingia macintoshii by E. Ray Lankester since he dissected the first specimen provided by a certain Professor Mackintosh between rounds of golf at Saint Andrew’s in Scotland (which for some reason, as an atom in the universe of golf trivia, reminds me of the legendary invention of golf by the Bullroarer Took at the Battle of Greenfields). Golfingia is still the name of a major genus of the organisms.

OK. So now I’ve convinced you (I hope) these things are cool but odd. They share a lot in common with annelids. But also a lot not — no segments. No bristles. No parapodia.

Hmm. Taxonomic impasse. Genes to the rescue!

“I’m gonna need computers. LOTS of computers.”

In a study in Nature released last week, scientists compared the DNA of a variety of peanut worms, spoon worms, and annelids. In this study, scientists used only sequences from expressed genes only. They did this by taking the messenger RNA, an edited form of DNA used to make proteins, and making DNA directly from it (called cDNA, or complementary DNA). They then sequenced this, as DNA pre-edited to make functional proteins is more likley to have meaningful changes to its code due to selective pressure. Bits of non-translated DNA that are edited out are free to mutate much more rapidly and randomly, dampening the signal of evolution.

Scientists can use this method because over time, more closely related organisms will have more similar genetic information. Comparing the sequences of one gene in three creatures to make a simple relatedness tree would be easy for a human, but this study looked at the amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) coded for by the DNA at 47,953 positions in 34 annelid groups. Computers more easily crank through these sorts of hyper-space logic problems, and they did here too. Based on this analysis, the peanut worms fit cozily inside the annelids. When we had only their appearance to go by, we were confused. But with DNA, in this case at least, the situation becomes much clearer.

Sooooooo — to sum up: up until now, scientists suspected peanut worms were in the same branch of bilaterally symmetrical animals as annelids, the lophotrochozoa (who either have crowns of cilia called lophophores or trochophore larvae), but not actually annelids themselves.  You can see where the peanut worms (sipunculids) used to fit in the lophotrochozoans here. Now, scientists see that they’re not just lophotrochozoans, they’re also our old friends the annelids.

Upending the Annelid Family Tree

But the biggest news from their results was not that peanut worms are annelids (although that is good to know), but that our traditional taxonomy of annelids is wrong — and that an old, dusty classification for annelids was right after all. The current system divided all the annelids into the clitellata, or worms that have a collar called the clitellum (that ring you see on earthworms), and the polychaeta, or bristle worms (which, as I’ve written before, have big, showy bristles). But it turns out that clitellata as a group is embedded within the polychaete worms, and that the polychaete worms have non-polychaete worms like peanut worms (which lack bristles, parapodia, or segements, because they lost them) and another non-polychaete that is a weirdo parasite of sea lillies —  the myzostomida, which I wrote about here — embedded within them. That makes polychaeta polyphyletic, which is a dirty, dirty word to taxonomists. It is a group that includes an ancestor and some, but not all of its descendents. Hence, polychaeta’s gotta go.

Don’t be frightened by this diagram — it just shows a geneaology of annelids, just like your family tree. The numbers on the tree indicate how certain the scientists/computers feel about their branching hypotheses; numbers close to 1.00 or 100 mean they are very highly confident that that hypothesis of relatedness is correct. And as you can see, with so much data, the scientists are very confident about this tree.

The *new-old* classification supported by the genes was proposed way back in 1865 (though it excluded the earthworms and leeches) by Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau. It is based not on bristling, but on life history — sedentary worms versus active worms. But later scientists dismissed it as the product of another dirty word: convergent evolution — the force that make whales and sharks both seem like they might be a lot more closely related than they are. Quoth the article “This systematization was dismissed in the 1970s as being arbitrary groupings useful only for practical purposes.” Ouch. Well, it turns out that was wrong.

The clitellata(collared/ringed annelids) are still supported as a true monophyletic (ancestor and all its descendants — distinguished by their synampomporphies; taxonomists like these) group. But there are two new groupings: the Sedentaria, which means what it sounds like: things that burrow, or live in tubes, sucking mud or lazily filtering water with tentacles and who could generally could lay around watching re-runs of “The West Wing” for the rest of their lives and not have to worry about their BMI. Things like earthworms, and deep-sea hydrothermal tube worms.

The Errantia are similarly named — they are errant creatures that swim, writhe, and actively pursure their prey or nosh on big algae. Things like the tentaculate and green-bomb-throwing ex-polychaetes I’ve written about here before. On the fringe of these two groups we have some organisms that are neither — like peanut worms — but are still annelids based on their genes and morphology. And there you have it.

Once you have a tree like this, it’s  a fairly simple logic problem to determine what the ancestral form that existed way back on each of those branch points must have looked like. You just look at its descendants and see what they have in common. And here is the drawing the scientists came up with for the ancestral annelid (last common ancestor, scientsts would say) and the ancestral Clitela and Errantia.

(a) shows features the first annelid likely possessed, (b) the first Errantian, and (c) the first Sedentarian. Note they all have parapodia, though the bristles are much shorter and feebler in Sedentarians, and the parapodia are not supported by stiff internal bristles (chaetae: kee-tee).

As you can see, they have determined that that first annelid worm (a) was indeed segmented, since peanut and another unsegmented annelid I did not cover — the spoon worms, or Echiura — are embedded within segmented annelids, not both at the base of the tree.

The annelid in the earliest branching position — Chaetopterus, or the parchment worm (see left) — is not only segmented, but quite complicatedly so — it has three different sections of segments on its body.

So it seems the peanut worm simply found that, although segments and bristles were awesome, they were costly options it simply didn’t need to get the job done in its little marine habitats, where it has happily existed more or less as-is, and perturbed by little except predators and Chinese gourmands, for over 500 million years.

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* Modern taxonomy attempts to base groupings on evolutionary history, since it only happened one way and once. Any other classification system would be arbitrary

Struck, T., Paul, C., Hill, N., Hartmann, S., Hösel, C., Kube, M., Lieb, B., Meyer, A., Tiedemann, R., Purschke, G., & Bleidorn, C. (2011). Phylogenomic analyses unravel annelid evolution Nature, 471 (7336), 95-98 DOI: 10.1038/nature09864

Arendt, D. (2011). Evolutionary biology: Annelid who’s who Nature, 471 (7336), 44-45 DOI: 10.1038/471044a

Myzostoma cirrifera. Upper layer of internal organs on the right, lower level at left. More on this guy below. Creative Commons W. Blaxland Benham (after Lang and von Graf)

As we ended last year with a slide show, so shall we begin this year with another. The Census of Marine Life has been a herculean 10-year mission to seek out new life and new civilizations (OK, maybe just one of those) in the ocean. The hundreds of scientists involved have succeeded spectacularly, though still have likely only scratched the surface.

Last fall scientists disclosed many of their results, and some of the most striking images have been collected by National Geographic into a tome called “Citizens of the Sea“, available since last fall. Cornelia Dean (science reporter and former science editor at the New York Times, who I was fortunate enough to meet in grad school (for science writing)) reviewed the book in the Science Times on Tuesday, and included a spectacular slide show that is above all what I’d like you to look at today.

But before I write more about that, my first impression of the book from flipping through it on Amazon is that it is curiously out-dated graphically. Its chunky photo layout and washed-out art seem like something you’d find in a National Geographic book from the 1980s. It pales in comparison to the stunning layouts and vivid photography of the University of Chicago Press’s “The Deep” and DK Books’ “Reef” and “Prehistoric Life”. The book also seems heavily weighted (as most are) toward metazoans, or, to put in in English, the big stuff in the ocean. As usual, microbes, protists, and larvae are missing out of proportion to their importance.

Of course, that has no bearing on the text, which I have not had time to peruse, and seems it may be more substantial than what you get in those other books since it was penned by Nancy Knowlton, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian. And judging by the nine five-star reviews at Amazon (the book received no ratings less than five), the writing is where the book shines, just as much as it is wanting in those other books.

Still, as Ms. Dean points out, the book is a bit scattershot taxonomically, making it hard for readers to understand biodiversity systematically. That omission — common to many books — is part of why I started this blog. When you can fit new organisms into general taxonomic groups in your head and relate them to other groups, it not only makes organisms easier to remember and their biology more understandable, it helps you understand the path of evolution too.

OK, back to what really matters: the critters. A few comments on the organisms in the slide show: When I was in grad school (for mycology), I studied fungal spores that, while admittedly huge for fungi, were on the order of the same length as the copepod (Ceraqtonotus steinigeri) pictured in the show — 200-300 micrometers (not my spore photo, but take a look here). That’s right: there are fungal spores as big as that copepod, which looks like it could be shrimp-sized if you didn’t have the scale bar to tell you better. Think about that.

You’ll also notice that the show features two — count ‘em, 2! — new Arctic bryozoan species. Remember the bryozoans — the moss animals? I covered them in my first guest blog at Scientific American. The photographs are of their calcareous skeletons only — the little animals you’d find poking their lophophores (crown of feeding tentacles) out of those holes are conspicuously absent, probably due to the preparation method involved in scanning electron microscopy — that is, spraying your sample with a film of gold.

Finally, I want to point out a delightful little organism new to me — the myzostomid, or parasite of crinoids, or sea lillies near the end of the show (see additional illustration at top of this post). I could write a whole book about the sea lillies and their charms (they were super-abundant in former times, and their fossils are still so. You can find little stem pieces in marine rocks all over North America, and the most stunning collections of fossilized sea-lily beds are swirling virtuoso works of Art Nouveau). But this little guy (being unceremoniously trod upon by a limelight-hogging shrimp) is apparently a representative of an entire group that has evolved just to parasitize sea lillies*. The myzostomids, while unrelated taxonomically, seem to be part flatworm (their diverticulated reproductive system resembles the dendritic digestive system of flatworms), part chiton/scale insect (their shield-like bodies). They’ve even adopted the vivid coloration of their hosts.

And here’s the kicker: they’re annelids — the group traditionally known as “segmented worms”, the most famous member being the humble earthworm. You see the segments? Me neither. Evolution: the great aimless wanderer. But oh, what beauties it stumbles into.

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*They’re active feeders on sea lillies, so I don’t know why the slide show caption says that it’s “commensal”, or a passive guest. Of course, Cornelia also says that the tubular eyes of the barreleye fish stick up above its head, when, as expertly covered by Steven Colbert two years ago, they are clearly inside its see-through head. Don’t get too mad at Cornelia, though. As a former reporter, I can say we do our best, but we’re on deadline, and sometimes we make mistakes.

Although I have to admit I was cheering for the worm at the end of this video. Come on, little squidworm! Evade that vacuum tube! I have no idea why. I’m all for science.

As you can see, the key feature of the squidworm are its voluptuous tentacles. You can get a much better look at them here. According to my admittedly scanty sources, the squidworm lives in the deep (ca. 10,000 feet, or nearly two miles down) and feeds on marine snow, a mixture of fish poop and dead plankton. I’m glad I don’t have to eat marine snow. I have to imagine it has the taste and consistency of that gruel from The Matrix . . .

What is unclear is whether they use those tentacles to grab their food, although I would imagine that is the case because most tenatculated organisms do. (UPDATE: According to information here, eight of its tentacles are used for breathing (gas exchange of CO2 and O2 by increasing the surface area for it) and the two that are loosely coiled in this picture are indeed for feeding. I don’t count eight of the other tentacles in the picture, but if the scientists say so. . . )  In any case, recall that polychaetes as  a group are characterized by lateral body extensions called parapodia (what look like their feet) that have bristly extensions called chaete (“kee-tee”), hence the name polychaete for the group. Polychaetes come in a vareity of splendiferous forms, including the christmas tree worm, the Pompeii worm, the recently discovered Osedax whale-bone-boring worm, and the Methuselah-esque (life expectancy: something like 250 years) cold methane seep tube worm Lamellibrachia. Polychaetes, in turn, are annelid (segmented) worms, like our old friend the earthworm. You can see how everyone is related (sort of — science in progress) here.

The squidworm stands out among polychaetes in a few ways: it is free-swimming, while most are tunnelers of the sea floor. It also has six pairs of oppositely branched nuchal organs — cilia-lined structures typically found in pits and used for smelling or sensing things. I’m not sure where those are located in the pictures. And its got those tentacles, which are as long or longer than its body.

Finally, the squidworm was discovered in the Celebes Sea. Where is the Celebes Sea? you may be wondering. GOOD QUESTION. I did not know either, so I looked it up. It’s in southeast Asia, just to the south of the Philippines and sorta midway between Australia and Vietnam.

And now you know.

Photo/Charles Fisher, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Click for link.

The New York Times just published a wonderful look at the thinking of scientists about the fate of the many cold seeps in the Gulf of Mexico, something I’ve been pondering myself a fair bit over recent weeks. I’ve explored the venerable tube worms of cold-seeps before here before, but never in regard to rogue petrochemicals. The communities at these seeps live on oil and other hydrocarbons naturally seeping from the ocean floor, so whether a larger dose will harm them is an interesting question. The consensus for now seems to be probably yes, but we really don’t know.

Whatever you do, don’t miss the beautiful slide show of this fascinating and under-publicized ecosystem. Watch for the orange bacteria, a spectacular black coral, and for brittle stars that put the Lacoön to shame.

In this first video you can see our subject looking kind of cute and shy (awwww!). Pay attention to the dorsal (top) vessel and you’ll see the “human-like blood” being pumped through the worm’s closed circulatory system (just like us!). In Nereis, the dorsal vessel itself does most of the pumping. Also note double eye spots (this guy is literally a four-eyes) and the leg-like parapodia with their bristly setae.

But in this video you’ll find Nereis has a second, distinctly not cute side: vicious predator. Watch for it to evert its pharynx, and particularly watch for the TWO GIANT FANGS (technical term: jaws) on the end. You can also see the pumping blood at the beginning of this film. Unfortunately, this one is a bit dark.

Although you may be tempted to think these guys are closely related to millipedes and centipedes, they’re not. This is yet another case of  — you guessed it — convergent evolution.

. . . Is not the name of a new DARPA grant project. All over teh intert00bz this week was the story of a newly discovered group of annelid polychaete worms following the publication of a paper describing them in Science. Remember annelids? Segmented (often) worms? The ones with the “human-like” blood? Like tube worms and sludge worms and . . . oh yes, of course, leeches and earthworms. Let’s have a look, courtesy Ed Yong:

Ok, well that’s pretty cool, but not too much to see here. Built like a trireme, moves like a belly dancer, swims in the deep ocea. . . . holy ****! It’s got glowing green sacs of goo on its neck that it launches like floating chinese lanterns when poked!

Swima sp. Used with permission courtesy Karen Osborn

Wow! According to the scientists who discovered them, the worms are probably using these like submarine countermeasures — the old lure-the predator-towards-the light while you scuttle quietly away. There are four bomb docking points on either side of the neck (the authors call them “bomb bays” in the paper’s supporting material). The worms seem kinda stingy with them, though, and will only release a few at a time if poked. It probably takes them a while to grow back. The authors had the guts to name the genus Swima, and one species Swima bombviridis — the swimming green bomb.

The bomb throwers aren’t rare, either. They are large (a few centimeters long), common organisms that are fairly widely distributed, judging by their pads off both the coast of California and the Phillipines.

And there are many different sorts. Here’s a tree illustrating some relationships between the groups.

A proposed family tree for the genus Swima. Note the bodies are transparent except for the gut. Used with permission, courtesy Karen Osborn.

Inside each bomb are two large and two small compartments that are probably breached when the bomb is ejected to mix chemicals that react to light up the whole sac. At a historic site at Rocky Mountain National Park a few weeks ago I heard about a similar concept in fire extinguisher design from the 1920s. . . break glass to mix chemicals, which react to remove any oxygen, fire, and aerobic life from the room. I’ll stick with my red cylindrical pressurized mace, thank you very much.

Ah-hem. Polychaetes. Right. These worms are polychaetes, which means, roughly, many bristles. The bristles (called setae) are made of a very interesting polysaccharide called chitin, which is found, strangely enough, in hard invertebrate body parts and the cell walls of fungi. Setae extend from parapodia, or foot-like projections from each segment. The parapodia are rife with blood vessels that help the animal exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide.

On the left, a trochophore larva. "One day I will be a beeee-utiful chiton". Center, metamorphosis. At right, a juvenile.

And polychaetes have a very interesting ciliated larval form called a trochophore; that is, they have lots of little filaments that beat back and forth to move it around. Annelids aren’t the only group that has trochophores; mollusks and a few others do too. If you saw one floating in the ocean on its own, you might think it was a protist, or single-celled microbe (hmmm. . . . ). In order to get a big polychaete, the trochophore starts adding segments, and presto chango, you have annelid worm! Above is a picture of the general process for a chiton, a kind of mollusk.

The variety of known polychaetes, ca. 1800s. I love these 19th century biodiversity prints. Question: Why are they all by Germans? "Borstenwurmer des Meeres". A variety of marine worms. In: "Das Meer" by Matthias Jacob Schleiden, 1804-1881. P. 446. Library Call Number QH91.S23 1888. Image ID: libr0409, Treasures of the NOAA Library Collection

There are some 10,000 known polychaete species in a variety of hallucinatory flavors. Some are free-swimming, like Swima, while others live in tubes or burrows. Many are brightly colored, like christmas tree worms, fan worms, and peacock worms. You can get an idea of the cutting edge knowledge of polychaete diversity (ca. 19th century) from the print at right. Only the freshest and most up-to-the-minute science for you, dear readers.

Yet it is assuredly, despite its intriguing diversity, miserably outdated. We didn’t even know that this major, distinctive polychaete group existed until one swam in front of a submersible in 2001. What else don’t we know about?

For a nice slide show of various Swima species, check out this gallery by National Geographic.

The background here is that a North Carolina construction company was hired by the city of Raleigh to inspect its sewer lines. They used a flexible periscope to snake their way in and capture video. I’m sure they never expected what they were about to find. This one is not for the faint of heart, kids. Brace yourself and hit play.

Speculation on the identity of these masses has ranged from bryozoans to annelid worms and slime molds to space aliens.

One thing I can say for sure is this is NOT a slime mold. No slime mold is capable of moving that quickly. To see slime molds move, you’d have to time lapse the heck out of a video. This is also not what I’d call slime mold habitat. They like water, but not THAT much water. They tend to prefer a nice soil/dead wood wrap, easy on the sunlight.

Several experts queried by both Deep Sea News (where I found this gem) and ABC News (lots of good reporting here) seem to be agreeing that this is, in fact, a colony of Tubifex tubifex, or sludge worms. Here’s DSN:

Enter stage right Dr. Timothy S. Wood who is an expert on freshwater bryozoa and an officer with the International Bryozoology Association.  I sent along the video and this was his reponse…

Thanks for the video – I had not see it before. No, these are not bryozoans!  They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting. Interesting video.

So, for the record, here are what individual Tubifex worms can look like:

Matthias Tilly/Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Sludge worms are annelid worms, just like tube worms, which means they have . . . wait for it . . . *human-like blood*! Combined with their filamentous form, and synchronous contractions, it really does add up to give these clusters the appearance of a pulsating heart. Or something. If you watch the video carefully (don’t have anything to eat first), you can see the individual worms snaking around in that mass.

According to the all-knowing, all-seeing Wikipedia, T. tubifex lives in lakes and rivers ingesting bacteria and other organic debris. Identifying them is difficult, though, because, inconveniently enough, they dissolve the reproductive organs we use to identify them when they’re finished mating.  “[Barry White music in background] Oh honey . . . come on over here and give me some OH WHY DO I EVEN TRY!?” In addition, their physical appearance changes based on water quality, which might explain their, well, extraterrestrial appearance in the above video.

And perhaps not unexpectedly, fish apparently find these guys delicious. Sludge worms: they’re what for dinner. Now with 95% more meaty slime! Hey, don’t knock ’em. They’ll put scales on your chest.

For one last wormy treat, here is a video of the little guys fully submersed in the lab:

So, I ask you: space aliens or sludge worms? You decide.

And what is the most important underwater discovery Ballard’s helped make? Not the Titanic. “The new life forms we found.” Amen, brother!

The life forms in question include the famous Riftia pachyptila, or giant tube worm. Riftia does indeed have “human-like blood” containing hemoglobins similar to ours but also able to bind oxygen in the presence of sulfur (which can be the tube worm bacterial partner’s food), something that would kill most of the rest of the hemoglobin-using world.

Giant tube worms are also among the longest-lived animals on Earth, capable of living over 200 years. They’re in the same phylum as earthworms — Annelida — who also have hemoglobin containing blood. Riftia has tube worm relatives that live shallower in the sea, too. But don’t get the impression these are the only deep-sea worms we’ve found. There are many species adapted to feed on differing parts of the veritable all-you-can-filter buffet of chemicals that ooze, squirt, or jet from the ocean floor.

Take, for instance, Lamellibrachia luymesi, a tube worm that lives in the Gulf of Mexico around cold oil and methane seeps.

Lamellibrachia luymesi. Photo/Charles Fisher, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. Click for link.

Since it lives at colder temperatures (and is less likely than Riftia to get wiped out by a sudden devastating change in the hydrothermal vent plumbing or an underwater eruption), it lives even longer — and may even hold the world animal longevity title at over 250 years of age.

Now I know a lot of my friends are space nuts who love NASA. Who doesn’t love NASA? But I must echo Ballard: NASA’s one year budget to go to places where life doesn’t even exist (most likely) would pay for 1600 years of NOAA research. It just ain’t fair! Think about it: we’d been to the moon for 10 years before we even knew “black smokers” and Riftia communties that live totally independently of the sun existed. What is wrong with that picture? Couldn’t we do a little better for NOAA?

Any lawmakers who might be reading this blog, take note: studying Earth is just as (if not more) important as studying other planets. We live here! And what’s more, weird, wonderful life waits for us in countless crannies, and many of said crannies are under the sea. Let’s go there (and let’s line item one of these for Jen, so she can go there too. : ).

Discovered via Deep Sea News.