Thousands of years ago, hydrothermal vents fed worms deep below the ice. Scientists have found 300-year-old sponges feeding on the worms’ fossilized remains.
80 miles across the seafloor of the central Arctic, the Langseth Ridge is craggy, barren, and generally inhospitable. And it should be: Unlike more productive oceans, few nutrients swirl here, thanks to the ice above blocking the light. Thousands of years ago, however, the peaks of the ridge hummed with volcanic activity, which produced sulfur that fed tube worms—the ones you may have seen from
“It's like a forest,” says Teresa Maria Morganti, an ecologist and expert on sponges at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, lead author of the new paper. “It's really a hot spot of life in the middle of the desert. It's really fascinating how they could exploit this ancient previous community.”Photograph: Morganti, et al., Nature Communications
And that’s not all they’re eating: The same bacterial community may be helping the sponges pull food from the water itself. “We have found that the symbionts inside the sponges can use the solid organic matter that is in the water column, and at the same time they can use dissolved inorganic carbon in the water column as well,” says Morganti. “So it's really a joint effort between sponges and their symbionts.
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