eBay’s history is dotted with carcasses of endangered and vulnerable species. In 2000, the Sea Turtle Conservancy announced that a large selection of illegal hawksbill turtle shell products were available on the online auction site.
“On Jan. 6, about about 50 genuine tortoise shell items were listed for sale through ebay, said Gary Appelson, advocacy coordinator for the nonprofit Caribbean Conservation Corporation (CCC). The illegal products included intricately designed hair ornaments and glasses cases. The bidding on an unworked “scute” or piece of hawksbill shell was at $480, with nearly 30 bids registered. The seller, listed only as “isabeII4,” said it was “perfectly legal” to sell the piece because it had been given as a gift many years ago, implying that it was originally purchased before the Endangered Species Act was passed. IsabeII4 suggested that the piece, when worked, would make several sets of wrist cuffs or hair combs.”
“An IFAW report in 2007 revealed that at least 90% of all investigated ivory listings on eBay were legally suspect. Furthermore, [a] released 2008 IFAW investigation revealed that ivory traded on eBay significantly increased in the United States since the 2007 report.”
That 2008 report found that two-thirds of the online trade in endangered animals, especially ivory from elephants, occurred on eBay.
eBay has enacted policies but many have found these polices to be inadequate and nearly impossible to enforce. In 2006, eBay banned the sale of smalltooth sawfish, an endangered species, but inly in response to pressure from the Ocean Conservancy.
“A 2004 study of eBay sales of sawfish snouts found about 20 transactions a month. Prices averaged $119 a snout but went as high as $1,242.”
Earlier this year Alexis Rudd, a graduate student in the Department of Biology at the University of Hawai’I, posted to Twitter (@SoundingTheSea) fidning endangered Hawaiian land snails on Ebay and Etsy.
“Kate Lunz didn’t know what to expect as she piloted her white Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission truck to the Port of Tampa in July 2010. The day before, customs authorities had called the 32-year-old, PhD-toting marine biologist and asked her to inspect the contents of two 40-foot shipping containers that had been sent from the Solomon Islands and pulled for investigation… The sight devastated Lunz. The rubble was actually a giant batch of stony coral — an order scientifically known as Scleractinia — an exceptionally fragile animal that’s vital to the health of the world’s oceans. Thousands of pieces had been plundered from the South Pacific and shipped halfway around the world to be cleaned, turned into tourist trinkets, and sold down the coast of Florida at a staggering markup.”
In original the story about corals and trinkets and eBay add occurs prominently.
So the question we at DSN asked is where all this coral might have ended up if not confiscated. A substantial number were likely to end up on eBay. Keep in mind that the Fiji is the #1 exporter of coral for the curio (decorative) trade and live rock (aquarium) trade. The US is the #1 importer of Fiji coral.
Ebay’s policies explicitly forbid sales of endangered species or parts thereof and carries other specific prohibitions including walrus tusks and whale bones, including scrimshaw and any other item made of marine mammals, no matter when produced. No seabirds or their feathers, eggs or nests. Nothing made of turtle shells. Nothing from polar bears. As well CITES permitting must be followed.
Appendix II lists species that are not necessarily now threatened with extinction but that may become so unless trade is closely controlled. It also includes so-called “look-alike species”, i.e. species of which the specimens in trade look like those of species listed for conservation reasons (see Article II, paragraph 2 of the Convention). International trade in specimens of Appendix-II species may be authorized by the granting of an export permit or re-export certificate. No import permit is necessary for these species under CITES (although a permit is needed in some countries that have taken stricter measures than CITES requires). Permits or certificates should only be granted if the relevant authorities are satisfied that certain conditions are met, above all that trade will not be detrimental to the survival of the species in the wild. (See Article IV of the Convention).
To reiterate an exporting but not importing permit is required. In just a quick search Al, aka para_sight here at DSN, found multiple examples
Blue coral (CITES II) permit needed for international shipping
We are not saying these are illegal activities but there is no proof by either the seller or eBay that permitting requirements have been met. Although, we at DSN are opposed to any selling or purchasing of corals as harvesting corals causes considerable habitat destruction and degradation of reefs.
In my own searching I found some suspect marine and freshwater mollusks. Freshwater streams and lakes throughout the U.S. possess endemic clams. Many of these because of their rarity and anthropogenic threats occur on CITES lists, including the most severe Appendix 1. None of these protected freshwater clams occur on eBay. However, these species are extremely difficult to tell apart even by experts. How do we know if these species are actually the nonprotected species? Likewise, several species of the Giant Clam, Tridacna, occur on the Appendix II. Exporting and quotas from key countries are heavily regulated. How do we know if the 166 specimens of Tridacna listed on eBay have met CITES requirements? We don’t.
All this suggests that eBay has not went far enough to protect vulnerable and endangered species. No evidence exists to instill any confidence in buyers that items on eBay can be legally sold. Is eBay still a blackmarket for protected animals? I can’t tell but for now its best not to buy from eBay until I can be.
The #SciFund Challenge is an experiment – can scientists use crowdfunding to fund their research? The current rate of funding for science proposals in the U.S. is ~20%. The current rate for crowdfunding statues of RoboCop in Detroit is 135% – to the tune of $67,436. Perhaps Scientists can do better by tapping this reservoir of funds from an interested public. See here for our call to arms! The #SciFund Challenge is also a way to get scientists to directly engage with the pubilc. Crowdfunding forces scientists to build public interaction and outreach into their research from day one. It’s a new mechanism to couple science and society, and one that we think has a lot of promise. See here for more on this secret agenda of #SciFund.
I cannot express how brilliant this idea is. A funding link already exists between the public and the scientists in which taxpayer dollars fund the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, and others. In this model the public is removed form the science they support. Too many middlemen…the government in the channel between the public and science and the media between science and the public.
#SciFund is back and bigger than ever. During the month of May, 75 scientists are campaigning to raise awareness and funding for their research. There’s an entire page of cool and important aquatic biology projects – check them out, and donate to win fun prizes!
Please enjoy this delightful piece of comment spam that we received at here at DSN. I’ve redacted the contact information but left the rest as is. Who wouldn’t trust Savy Pappy with a Fukushima reactor? I’m sending them $100,000 right now!
American People, Global Community,
Ladies and Gentlemen
We are the Freedom consultants firm. [address]. We are
the firm that solves major strategic or scientific problems. Our Top scientist has been using science to save people for over 40 years. Also providing the strategy’s necessary for everything from business, military to elections of major offices in the United States of America… [number] text us $100,000 retainer renewable.
. http://deepseanews.com/2011/12/japanese-tsunami-debris-link-roundup/
To all USA firms, hire us we are perfect to do the job. It takes $25,000 per day to hire our firm of 5 Top professionals the minimum residual is $125,000 renewable weekly. We can direct a stop of radioactive material from reaching the USA west coast as we know the science. Deadly Debree in sept 2013 through 2014 with co operation from the Government, and your financial backing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown http://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/us-radiation-monitoring-map-in-real-time/
Freedom Consultant firm, [address] .
Rural office ,mother Earth farm site for sale. Just $125k
http://marshall.craigslist. text [number]
Retainer $100,000 send a contract and check
We need to do a closure on one of fukashemias’ leaking plutonium reactor. 100 million retainer one time price for sealing the leaking now metal melting down vessel. Offer expires July 4 2012 savypappy101@domain name
Sardines school off Baja California. Photo by Jon Bertsch. http://www.thalassagraphics.com/blog/?p=167
I only eat anchovies with Caesar salad, and am rather fond of the tiny fish that add a bit of strong flavor to the romaine lettuce. I’m unusual for wanting to get even that close to the tiny, oily fish – sardines, anchovy, menhaden – that used to be a staple of regular American food. That’s why Julia Whitty’s recent article in Mother Jones in which she encourages consumers to pause before they “ take a bite of that sardine sandwich” was so surprising. You won’t find sardines anywhere on the list of the top 10 consumed seafoods - or do you? Here’s why eating more sardines directly would actually be good for the ocean:
1) The United States Pacific sardine fishery is not overfished. This may be surprising to people who are familiar with the famous collapse of the Monterey (central California) sardine fishery, which was described by John Steinbeck in his book Cannery Row. Puzzlement over this collapse launched one of the most important long-term oceanographic investigations of all time, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation, which continues to provide critical scientific information to this day. Over 50 years of investigation has shown that this crash actually WASN’T caused by overfishing – at least not directly.
Sardine and anchovy populations are actually tied directly to large-scale climatic conditions – if they’re favorable, there’s lots of fish. If they’re unfavorable, the fish crash. Overfishing may have exacerbate the crash and slowed recovery, but it probably didn’t cause it directly. Some researchers are predicting a similar sardine crash this year due to unfavorable climatic conditions similar to those seen before the late 1940s crash, and are encouraging managers to decrease sardine quotes in order to speed post-crash recovery. (Though this is controversial – see this response).
Historically, sardine & anchovy fisheries in other parts of the world, such as the South American anchoveta fishery (the biggest fishery in the world) are less well regulated. Overfishing in these ecosystems leads to no room for error – if there is the slightest change in the climate that causes the fish to reproduce less fast, the fishery crashes. Buy U.S. Pacific sardines.
2) Americans should eat more sardines directly, and fewer sardines indirectly. Only about a quarter of the enormous U.S. sardine haul is eaten directly - the rest are sold as bait or as fishmeal. All of the three most popular U.S. seafoods – shrimp, salmon, and canned tuna – are farmed with fishmeal or caught with bait. This is why Jennifer Jacquet developed her “Eat Like A Pig” campaign. Grist covered this issue in response to Whitty’s article as well:
Geoff Shester, the California program director at Oceana, talked to Grist contributor Clare Leschin-Hoar for the article, “Small fish, big ocean: Saving Pacific forage fish.” We followed up with him to ask his take on sardine-eating. In the case of Pacific sardines, he said that “the lion’s share go to bluefin tuna farms (ranches) in Australia, then to commercial longline bait in international tuna fisheries.” Overall, he says, “consumers are demanding the wrong things. Instead of demanding farmed salmon, which uses at least three pounds of forage fish to get one pound of salmon, people should be demanding the forage fish themselves.”
Also, sardines are healthy! They appear on the New York Times list of the 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating. Also, food writer Michael Pollan’s Rule 32 (Don’t overlook the oily little fishes”) elaborates further:
Wild fish are among the healthiest things you can eat, yet many wild fish stocks are on the verge of collapse because of overfishing. Avoid big fish at the top of the marine food chain–tuna, swordfish, shark–because they’re endangered, and because they often contain high levels of mercury. Fortunately, a few of the most nutritious wild fish species, including mackerel, sardines, and anchovies, are well managed, and in some cases are even abundant. Those oily little fish are particularly good choices. According to a Dutch proverb: “A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.”
3) Since sardine and other small forage fish like anchovies and menhadan congregate in single-species schools in the water column (see the awesome photo by Jon Bertsch at the top of this post!), there’s relatively little bycatch. Fishers are able to catch these fish, and only these fish, without accidentally killing a lot of other marine life. This is emphatically not the case with the longline tuna fisheries for which forage fish become bait. Fish farming operations have other significant environmental impacts, such as the infection of wild salmon stocks with farmed salmon parasites and damage to the ocean bottom communities. Eating sardines directly is far better for the ocean environment than filtering them through large predators caught accidentally with more large predators.
After the beating I took on bluefin tuna, I feel that I need to say that I am a marine biologist but not a fisheries scientist. A blog post can’t be a critical, comprehensive review of fisheries populations models, since a) nobody would read that and b) I actually do have a day job. But I love eating fish and reading scientific literature, so I keep writing on these issues in the attempt to make complex issues more accessible to the general public. Because when super-lefty-enviro magazines Grist and Mother Jones disagree, what the heck is a consumer to do?
Anyway, a sardine sandwich sounds super gross. Before you eat some sustainable tasty Pacific sardines, check out Barton Seaver’s website for far more tasty ways to eat them.
I just HAD to post this on DSN in case y’all missed Miriam’s links on Twitter. If you’re still on the fence in the vertebrates vs. invertebrates debate, this story will surely convince you of the winner (invertebrates, of course).
The folks over at BirdFellow witnessed an incredible sight: an octopus EATING a seagull in Victoria, BC. I could keep gushing about this awesomeness, but the pictures really speak for themselves:
Photos taken by Ginger Morneau at BirdFellow
Can someone please help me make this into an internet meme??
Of course, the octopus was probably getting revenge for this brutal massacre of its kinsmen:
This week the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorerhas been dropping its ROV Little Hercules onto various features in the northern Gulf of Mexico, including an old wood/iron wreck, salt domes and man-made seismic trenches. Okeanos has an interesting remote arrangement where folks back on the continent can direct the ROV pilots in real time by ship-to-shore communications linkup. It’s pretty cool telepresence stuff.
If you follow me on Twitter (@para_sight), you would have seen this week a steady stream of screen caps I grabbed from their live video feed (active at the time of publishing this), which I had running constantly on a second screen in my office. I’m not part of the OE team, but it’s pretty addictive viewing for the temporarily office-bound! For non-Twitter folks, here’s a gallery of shots of some of the things they saw. I am no expert on the taxonomy of deep sea critters; any bad ID’s are mine. I’ll take any missing ID’s too, just add them to the comments.
At two miles below the ocean’s surface, I see wooden carcasses, once buoyant, lying listlessly on the abyssal seafloor. They range from small fragments to 2000+ pound behemoths. Ligneous cadavers litter the seafloor, a last resting place for visitors from a faraway and drier place, becoming rare as distance to home increases.
Each day a tree dies. Its carcass may lay there on the forest floor, ravaged by fungus, insects, and plants as they grow from its remains. But, perhaps my tree meets a watery grave–gently floating down river ultimately finding itself bobbing in the ebb and flow of the tides. Eventually covered with an unexpected range of marine hitchhikers, from worms to bivalves, the tree is forced under by their collective weight.
Or perhaps my tree’s end was violent. Monsoonal rain and flooding waterlogged the tree and, upon receding, carried the carcass to sea. Maybe the flooding caused a massive turbidity current, an underwater landslide, carrying the tree down a submarine canyon.
Alternatively a coastal tree simply may have found itself horizontal in the surf, pounded by waves driving water in and air out. Or maybe my tree leisurely traveled the ocean and over time while capillary action pulled water further in its submerged trunk sinking it to the dark bottom.
No matter its path to the deep, at a critical depth and pressure the ocean squeezes the last bit of terrestrial air out of the wood replacing it with brine. So begins a story with a tree sinking to the deep.
Act 2: A House and a Buffet
Xylophaga burrows in wood. Image from the Field Museum
This wooden carcass on the seafloor, called a woodfall, brings shelter and sustenance. In the deep, devoid of light and plants, a wood carcass also brings a rare commodity—food. The amount of carbon a tree or piece of wood brings to the seafloor can be anywhere from ten to a thousand times that regularly encountered on the seafloor. From the carcass comes nourishment to sustain deep-sea life.
A piece of hard wood also provides another rarity on a muddy seafloor—a solid surface. Currents are sluggish in the inches close to the seafloor as they’re slowed by friction as the water moves across the bottom. Without currents the oxygen and food needed for life cannot travel in. Organisms can rise above these current problems by climbing wooden hills.
A wooden carcass lies on the seafloor long ago consumed by organisms of the deep
Act 3: Eating Wood, Not For Everyone
The new species Xylophaga microchira with its muscular foot extended from the shell. Xylophaga uses this large muscular foot to leverage and scrape its beak like shell against the wood. Illustration from Voight (2007)
The digestion of a fibrous and solid food source requires talent, a hearty gut, and some help–traits not many species possess. These organisms finish the tree off, tearing it apart from inside and out. Bivalves of the genus Xylophaga (measuring less than an inch)use a ridged shell to bore into the wood, ingesting the wood fragments. On their gills they host an endosymbiotic bacteria that can digest their woody snack. What’s surprising given the rarity and uncertainty of that wooden treat along the deep-sea floor, is that nearly a dozen species make their life this way and half-dozen Xylophaga species can occur on a single log.
As Xylophaga consume their way through the heart of the wooden cadaver, the squat lobsters Munidopsis andamanica pick away at the barky skin. These squat lobsters use their spoon shaped claws to tear pieces of the decayed wood off, using the depression in their claw to hand off to the feeding appendages well adapted to dealing with large food items. With the aid of bacteria and stomach-like gastric mill lined in teeth, the dead wood starts its path to providing nutrition.
Munidopsis andamanica. Photo C shows the spoon-shaped depression formed by a closed-up claw. In D we see an scanning electron microscope view of the tip of the claw.
Act 4: Death Becomes Wood
Members of a woodfall community are a mixed bag. The most prominent members because of their size and sheer numbers are wood-boring bivalves and squat lobsters. Mollusks, including chiton, snails, limpets, and bivalves dominate. Crinoids will take up residence to escape sluggish bottom currents and feed in the currents above the seafloor. A variety of crustaceans from roly-poly relatives to hermit crabs will set up shop. Marine worms, including some large predators, work their way through the boreholes created by Xylophaga.
The most enigmatic and rare species to inhabit a woodfall is the echinoderm Xyloplax. Only discovered in 1983 and described in 1986, Xyloplax likely represents a completely new class of echinoderms on par with urchins, crinoids, starfish, basket stars, and brittle stars. At around 10mm in size the species represents an anomaly with a bizarre anatomy (discussed by Chris Mah here and here and myself here) including the complete lack of a gut.
Not your typical Echinoderm. This female specimen of a Xyloplax seastar was collected along the Juan de Fuca Ridge off the coast of the state of Washington; it measures less than a quarter-inch (4 mm) and shows brooded embryos
Act 5: From Death to Life to Death
A log wrapped in mesh bag sits on the deep-sea floor as part of an experiment. Small squat lobsters, brittle stars, and crinoids can already be seen inhabiting the log after a less than year. A white blanket of bacteria begins to cover the log's end.
In 2011, I sat in a control room on the surface watching images on a high-definition monitor sent back to me from a robot 2 miles below. In front of me, or more accurately in front of the robot, is a log I deployed over 5 years ago. Around it are 36 logs ranging in size from a few pounds to well over 60.
With regard to woodfalls, our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge. Do the species we find on woodfalls require a house or lunch made of wood? Do the species we find on woodfalls require a wooden house made from a specific type of timber?
Last year, this question drove me to collaborate with graduate student Jenna Judge and her advisor David Lindberg from the University of California Berkeley last year. In Jenna’s words,
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you chucked a bunch of logs into the deep sea?… One question that I’m interested in is whether the kind of wood matters to the critters that are living on it. [Does] the physical composition of the wood [matter]? Is there a link between older groups of plants and older lineages of animals, which would suggest the animals in the ocean have responded evolutionarily to the evolutionary succession of plants on land? For instance, critters living on Ginkgo (a gymnosperm) would be older lineages than those living on Oak (an angiosperm).
This explains why Jenna and I are visiting the site in 2011 to deploy different types of wood, not why 36 pieces already lie on the seafloor.
In a typical community with a finite resource, we know a community rises, climaxes, and then wanes. At the climax, the diversity and total amount of life is at its highest. What occurs in the narrative of a woodfall community? When do the players enter and leave this performance? How long will with this woody drama last? Do certain players like Xylophaga have more important roles than others? Is the play the same every time?
In 2006, Jim Barry and I chunked 36 logs overboard to test these very ideas. Chunked may be a strong verb for sending them down on a benthic elevator. Once on the bottom, a remotely operated vehicle dispersed them over a 1600 square foot area now affectionately referred to as Deadwood. In 2011, we retrieved 18 of these. On the surface, Jenna, others, and I picked through the once solid but now bore-riddled and crumbling logs for Xylophaga, limpets, worms, snails, and other wee beasties. As we picked through the rotting wood carcasses, my level of excitement was only matched by the stench of decomposition. Why was I excited? I realized that I could address some of the key questions I posed 5 years earlier. More importantly, I realized, due to unexpected events in the life of these logs, some of those questions I now could not answer. This beautiful and unforeseen event, while invalidating my original experiment, yielded something more fascinating. It revealed far more about the function of the deep sea than I originally planned or hoped for from my meager experiment. What was that finding? You’ll just have to wait and see.
The real title of the paper is “Multiple self-splicing introns in the 16S rRNA genes of giant sulfur bacteria”. But who’s going to fall out of their chair for that?
The truth is, we do have aliens peppered among us. Think about Men in Black: plenty of space creatures, but Homo sapiens remains completely oblivious. Will Smith can separate the aliens from the humans (and look super smokin’ in the process), but that’s only because he knows what he’s looking for. But scientists…often we don’t know what we should be looking for.
Since we started using DNA to find species in natural environments, we’ve built up a fairly good idea of what we can usually expect to find in different habitats. Of course, there is a HUGE amount of undiscovered biodiversity, and many novel creatures yet to be discovered, but we at least know the major players. Bacteria, Archaea, Eukaryotes, and Viruses–we group species into these broad taxonomic groups since they represent the major domains of life on Earth (Well, so far at least…).
Our molecular toolkit is pretty badass. Us scientists can use the Polymerase Chain Reaction to amplify conserved, universal genes like those encoding the ribosomal subunits. Most living things can’t function without ribosomes, so their genomes must contain the instructions. Just like a handheld supermarket scanner, we can go into any environment (any store) and follow simple steps to get a list of ribosome DNA sequences and match them to species (akin to scanning the barcodes to pull up information about the products populating the shelves).
The problem? This approach assumes that all barcodes adhere to a standard format. Which normally, they do:
Except sometimes, they look like this:
I’m not an idiot–I know both of these are obviously barcodes. Our human eyes can see that. But the supermarket scanner can’t. Haven’t you ever been in line at the store (in a massive hurry), where you grab an item off the shelf and rush over to the cashier in hopes of quickly paying (to avoid being too fashionably late to your fabulous gala ball, of course)? That’s where things go awry and your item won’t scan, so you’re forced to wait (impatiently tapping your feet, dreaming of champagne) while another employee is summoned to fetch the correct price.
Everyone has faced this problem at the supermarket. Sure, the barcode on your idem looked like every other barcode, but when you go to scan it, the system can’t find the ID. If you knew it would be a problem ahead of time, you would have come up with another way for the cashier to access the needed information–in this case, you may have taken a picture on your phone to show the item on the shelf next to the price. If the mechanisms we have in place just can’t read a barcode (at the supermarket or in the lab), there must be an alternate solution to link the necessary information. Barcodes are meant to save us time, after all.
In a retail setting, a rogue barcode is not a big deal. There are plenty of bored teenagers who can be summoned to do the legwork. But in science, tricky barcodes are a more worrying issue. When applying DNA tools to study natural environments, we use molecular information to gather information about the community at hand. Each DNA barcode is useful because it returns a taxonomic name, which we can use to infer what a species might be doing–what its eats, the nutrients or chemicals it might help to break down, or the other species it might prey upon. When we’re delving into natural environments using DNA tools, we’re essentially scanning for barcodes in the dark and assuming we’re catching everything. And we certainly assume we’re capturing the most abundant and ecologically important species.
Except…the study I first mentioned puts a damper on this rose-tinted view. Turns out that some bacteria–giant sulfur bacteria, to be exact–actually have pretty f%&*#ing uncooperative barcodes. Because of the presence of noncoding introns within gene sequences, their ribosomal barcodes are longer than we’re normally used to seeing: we can’t scan them using our standard lab protocols. Salman et al. (2012) suggests that our inability to detect barcodes from sulfur bacteria may be seriously skewing our DNA-based interpretations of how ocean ecosystems function.
Large sulfur bacteria cycle nutrients LIKE A BOSS. They’re ecological powerhouses, involved in the turnover of sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus in seafloor habitats. So this barcode issue is a big deal–if we really want to understand ecosystem function, we definitely need to be able to spot these giant sulfur bacteria when they’re present (especially since they tend to occur at high densities). If we haven’t been finding these species using our bog standard molecular approaches, we might be totally misinterpreting species assemblages in sediment communities, and consequently, the process of nutrient cycling in the oceans.
The sulfur bacteria who have rogue barcodes are pretty awesome species, too! Included in this group is the largest known bacteria, Thiomargarita namibiensis. It quite literally is a giant bacteria, measuring in at 0.1mm to 0.75 mm.
The species name namibiensis indicates its origins in coastal Namibia, meaning Sulfur pearl of Namibia. This is a reference to the fact that the bacterium-chains have the appearance of a thin string of pearls, due to microscopic sulfur granules inside the bacteria, reflecting the incident light. [Wikipedia]
Wikipedia says this species looks like pearls, but I think they look like anal beads:
Thiomargarita namibiensis
T. namibiensis lives in ocean mud infused with sulfur, its favorite nutrient to gobble up. The species’ ability to oxidize sulfur (often in low oxygen conditions) makes them the Betty Ford clinic of the deep-sea: they intervene to remove otherwise toxic chemicals from the environment, using their specially adapted metabolic pathways.
Thiomargarita namibiensis…oxidize nitrate into sulfide in the low-nitrate conditions of their oxygen-poor habitat. This bacterium has accomplished this by having the ability to store both sulfur and nitrate. Each individual bacterial cell is almost entirely made up of a liquid vacuole, in which is contained large amounts of nitrate, often 10,000 times the amount in the surrounding seawater. The bacteria use this store of nitrate, gathered when it is abundant in the water surrounding the cells, to oxidize the sulfur from the seafloor. The cytoplasm of the cells line the inside of the cell membrane, allowing the bacterium the flexibility to diffuse the nitrate with the outside sulfide and giving it its huge size. Unlike its relation Triploca, Thiomargarita namibiensis does not have to migrate vertically in order to collect enough nitrate to properly oxidize; its cells can live submerged in the sediment for up to three months before requiring nitrate from the outside environment. They have also developed capabilities to withstand extreme environmental changes, such as an influx of oxygen or sulfide. [Microbe Wiki]
Sulfur bacteria may have been escaping our molecular scrutiny, but now the secret is out. Given their “alien” ribosomal sequences, we can design new methods to capture the enigmatic barcodes of these cool giant microbes. But science carries on, and there are plenty more questions to ask:
May 7th, 2012 
