ASGSB 1999 Annual Meeting Abstracts

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METAZOAN (REAL ANIMAL!) LIFE STYLES IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS OF THE DEEP SEA: BRINE POOLS, METHANE HYDRATES, HYDROCARBON SEEPS AND HYDROTHERMAL VENTS.  C.R. Fisher.  Dept. of Biology,  Pennsylvania State Univ., Univ. Park, PA.

   Some of the most extreme environments where animals survive are found associated with active vents and seeps in the deep-sea.  In addition to the extreme pressure, low temperatures, and lack of light which characterize the deep-sea in general, these environments are characterized by a variety of other factors which are hostile to most animals.  Specially adapted animals not only tolerate these conditions, they often thrive under them. In most cases this is due to a combination of physiological and behavioral adaptations that allow animals to avoid the extremes of their habitat, and yet benefit from the chemoautotrophic production that characterizes these environments.

   In the Gulf of Mexico, mussels with methanotrophic symbionts require environments with very high methane concentrations to survive.  They are adapted to tolerate high concentrations of crude oil and have also colonized pools of supersaturated brine on the ocean floor.  Also in the

Gulf is a species of polychaete, Hesiocaeca methanicola, which infests methane hydrates, tolerating poisonous gases and near anoxia apparently to farm bacteria on the surface of the hydrate.  At hydrothermal vents in the eastern Pacific the giant tubeworms have not only adapted to constant exposure to toxic levels of hydrogen sulfide and heavy metals, but their adaptations allow them to grow as fast as any other invertebrate on the planet and flourish in this toxic and ephemeral habitat.  Finally the temperature tolerance and other adaptations that allow Alvinellid

polychaetes to colonize hydrothermal chimneys with temperature gradients of up to several hundred EC per cm will be presented and discussed. 

(Supported by NSF: OCE-9633105 and OCE9712808, MMS 1435-10-96-CT-30813, and NOAA NURP)

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