July 2018 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 23. News From Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Continued from Page 10.


nearly impossible. A new study by Woods Hole Oceano-


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graphic Institution (WHOI) scientists has unveiled that these microbe-based ecosys- tems are surprisingly productive and play an important role supporting life higher up the food chain in the food-starved deep ocean. They estimate that worldwide, deep-sea hydrothermal vent microbial communities can produce more than 4,000 tons of organic carbon each day, the building block of life. That is roughly the same amount of carbon in 200 blue whales—making these ecosystems among the ocean’s most productive on a per volume basis. The study appears in the June 11, 2018, issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We found that microbial communities


living below the seafl oor at vents can gen- erate similar amounts of carbon as the well- known animal communities above seafl oor, like the tube worms, which are known to be as productive as rainforest ecosystems,” said Stefan Sievert, a microbiologist at WHOI and senior author of the study. “The signif- icant amounts of carbon these organisms produce daily provide an important source of food and energy for other organisms in the deep sea, where there’s generally a lot less carbon available.” As carbon from decom- posing marine life sinks from surface waters to the deep, bacteria and other microorgan- isms chomp away at it until it withers away to marine gristle. “What’s coming down from the surface to these depths isn’t all that much, and not very digestible to deep-sea life,” said Jesse McNichol, who conducted this work as a Ph.D. student at WHOI and is the fi rst author of the study. The microbes at vents get their energy


to live and grow through chemosynthesis, feeding off a chemical cocktail of hot hydro- thermal fl uids emanating from the ocean’s crust. And they, in turn, represent the base of the food web, providing food for other organisms that require preformed organic matter, just like humans do. “So the microbes play an important role


by generating new sources of carbon that other organisms can consume,” McNichol said. “Based on the relatively small area that vents occupy of the seafl oor, the overall productivity down there is small compared to what we see at the surface, but a little can go a long way in the deep sea and it also


creates hot spots of activity near vents.” Measuring the productivity of sub-sea-


floor microbe communities has been a daunting task. To accomplish it, the re- searchers collected microbe samples from a well-studied vent site on the East Pacifi c Rise known as Crab Spa. The vent fl uids were collected in water sampling contain- ers known as Isobaric Gas-Tight samplers (IGTs), which are designed to maintain the extreme pressures of the natural deep-sea environment where the microbes live. “If you bring the samplers up to the surface without maintaining the pressure that exists at the seafl oor,” explained Jeff Seewald, a geochemist at WHOI who developed these samplers and is a co-author of the study, “gases dissolved in the fl uid will outgas, similar to when you open a bottle of spar- kling water. This can change the fl uid’s chemistry and the activity of the microbes.” In the lab, deep-sea pressures and


temperatures were maintained while the researchers added chemicals such as ni- trate, hydrogen gas, and oxygen gas to the samples. Through this process, the scientists were able to measure the rates at which the microbes consumed specifi c chemicals and how effi ciently they converted them into biomass, a critical parameter to determine the productivity of the microbial ecosystem. To do so, the WHOI scientists teamed


up with researchers in Leipzig, Germany, to employ a novel analytical method known as NanoSIMS, allowing them to match the identities of microbes with their rates of car- bon production under diff erent incubation conditions at the level of individual micro- bial cells, showing that microbes known as Campylobacteria (formerly known as Epsilonproteobacteria) were the dominant carbon producers. “Some of the microbes in the incuba-


tions doubled their populations in just a few hours”, said Sievert. “This points to a very active subseafl oor biosphere at deep-sea vents.”


Given the critical role these microbial


communities play in the deep ocean, the scientists are looking for new and more routine ways to measure productivity miles below the sea surface. Recently, Sievert together with WHOI microbiologist Craig Taylor, microbial biogeochemist Jeremy Rich at the University of Maine, and engi- neers at WHOI have received funding from the National Science Foundation to develop


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a new type of sampling instrument known as the Vent-Submersible Incubation Device (“Vent-SID”) that complements the IGT- based approach. “It is designed to incubate microbes and


measure their activities right at the seafl oor,” explained Sievert, minimizing the time before incubations can start after taking a sample. Moving forward, the scientists also plan to measure microbial productivity at other vent sites across the global ocean to refi ne the estimates obtained in the present study. “We’ve been studying one type of vent


system that is quite common, but we’d like to look at other vent sites where there’s an abundance of other chemicals like hydro- gen, for example, and see if the productivity values change signifi cantly,” said McNich- ol.


This research was funded by the Di-


mensions of Biodiversity program of the US National Science Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Coun-


cil of Canada, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth Systems Science Fellowship, an award from the Ca- nadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, and the WHOI Academic Programs Offi ce. The European Regional Develop- ment Funds (EFRE - Europe funds Saxony) and the Helmholtz Association provided support for the analytical facilities of the Centre for Chemical Microscopy (ProVIS) at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Insti- tution is a private, non-profi t organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine re- search, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean's role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.


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