I know I should be blogging about more important things, like the horrible Ipswich murders, or cash for peerages or Iraq or the fact that Palestine is going to blow, but this may just be the coolest thing ever.
Imortant as those things are they’re just ephemeral human concerns compared to this:
Fish dance on sulphur cauldrons
By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, San FranciscoThese fish thrive in conditions that would kill most other fish.
Scientists have witnessed the extreme lifestyle of tonguefish that like to skip across pools of molten sulphur.
The animals – a type of flatfish – were filmed on three expeditions to undersea volcanoes in the western Pacific.
Huge numbers were seen to congregate around the sulphur ponds which well up from beneath the seafloor.
Researchers from the University of Victoria, Canada, are trying to work out how the creatures survive in such a hostile environment.
“There are a lot of toxic heavy metals coming out of these active volcanoes,” explained Dr John Dower, a fisheries oceanographer.
“As a visual spectacle, it’s like something from another planet Dr Alex Rogers, ZSL”
“The water is very warm, and it can be very acidic, the pH can be as low as two like sulphuric acid,” he told BBC News.”And yet here we’ve got a group that has not previously been seen in this type of environment and they’re doing very well – they’re actually thriving.”
The fish have been studied with remotely operated submersibles, including the Jason II vehicle this year.
Noaa’s arc
The area of interest is the Mariana Arc, a 1,200km chain of volcanic seamounts and islands between Guam and Japan.
It hosts a number of hydrothermal vents – rock systems that draw water through cracks in the seafloor, heat it to temperatures which can be well above 100C, load it with dissolved metals and other chemicals, and then eject the hot fluid back into the ocean.
This really is the most astonishing thing. It makes the possibility of life elsewhere in our solar sytem so much more likely – and these incredible little fish are not the only gobsmackingly interesting vent fauna they’ve found in the Marianas.
Which reminds me, I must go and feed our neighbour’s goldfish. She’s in Vienna for Christmas and I’m playing nanny to a couple of shubunkins and a small corydoras catfish. It may well pay longterm to be to nice to our finny friends. If reports are correct, they’re likely to inherit the planet.
Read more: Science, Marine Biology, Vent fauna
