Читать книгу Extreme Nature - Mark Carwardine - Страница 34

NAME	Pompeii worm Alvinella pompejana
LOCATION	deep-sea hydrothermal vents
ABILITY	withstanding scalding water

© Peter Batson/imagequest3d.com

The Pompeii worm thrives in large colonies in one of the darkest, deepest, most hellish places on Earth – close to a geyser of water so hot it could melt the worm in a second. It is also subject to a pressure great enough to crush a person and doused in a soup of toxic sulphur and heavy metals. Communities of Pompeii worms cling to the sides of ‘smokers’ 2–3 km (1.2–1.9 miles) under the sea. These belching chimneys grow over hydrothermal vents on volcanic mountain ranges, created from the chemicals that precipitate out as 300°C (572°F) vent water meets cold seawater.

To survive on a smoker requires super-worm strategies. For its home, the worm makes a paper-like chemical-and-heat-resistant tube. For a thermal blanket, it ‘grows’ a fleece of filamentous bacteria, feeding it with sugar-rich mucus secreted from its back. This blanket may also detoxify the vent fluid in its tube.

Unlike the vent tubeworm Riftia pachyptila, the Pompeii worm has a gut and ‘lips’ which it extends to ‘graze’ on bacteria that grow on the surface of the colony. But no one knows quite how it copes with what are the highest temperatures and temperature gradients experienced by any organism apart from bacteria, for though it angles its head (gills, mainly) away from the hottest water, its tail experiences flushes hotter than 80°C (176°F). Keen to make use of the Pompeii worm’s technology for human endeavours, scientists are now racing against each other to unravel its survival secrets.