First Animals to Live Without Oxygen Discovered

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Apr. 7, 2010) — Deep under the Mediterranean Sea, small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by 'poisonous' sulphides. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen.

Roberto Danovaro, from the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy, worked with a team of researchers to retrieve sediment samples from a deep hypersaline anoxic basin (DHABs) of the Mediterranean Sea and studied them for signs of life. "These extreme environments," said Danovaro, "have been thought to be exclusively inhabited by viruses, Bacteria and Archaea. The bodies of multicellular animals have previously been discovered, but were thought to have sunk there from upper, oxygenated, waters. Our results indicate that the animals we recovered were alive. Some, in fact, also contained eggs."

Electronmicroscopy shows that instead of aerobic mitochondria, these animals possess organelles resembling the hydrogenosomes found previously in unicellular organisms (protozoans) that inhabit anaerobic environments.

The implications of this finding may reach far beyond the darker parts of the Mediterranean Sea floor, according to Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In one of two commentaries accompanying this piece of research, she said, "The finding by Danovaro et al. offers the tantalizing promise of metazoan life in other anoxic settings, for example in the subsurface ocean beneath hydrothermal vents or subduction zones or in other anoxic basins."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100407094450.htm

[onehandle]

1. I'm not so much thinking of the implications of the sea, but of space.

More evidence that life could be anywhere and everywhere.

Not to mention Rush Limbaugh's head. No oxygen has reached his brain in years and yet there could be life in there.

[Taverner]

2. Exactly, and that the "goldilocks zone" may not be the limitation that it once was

[BrklynLiberal]

3. Not too sure about that lifey thingy in Limpball's head.

[mike_c]

4. bear in mind though that anoxia is not the same as vacuum....

Plenty of pressure where these animals live, and plenty of environmental electron donors and acceptors for energy harnessing redox reactions, even if they don't use O₂. In space, not so much.

[iris27]

5. Yes, but it widens the possibility of life on planets with a non-oxygen

atmosphere, similar to Venus or Titan.