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From: chi9@quads.uchicago.edu (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.chem
Subject: Re: Forgotten Entities: Do You Remember Any?
Summary: We may have forgotten them, but maybe they haven't forgotten us.  :-)
Keywords: The Slime at the Bottom of the Sea; origins of life; mid-ocean ridges
Message-ID: <1990Oct30.030717.8923@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: 30 Oct 90 03:07:17 GMT
References: <1990Oct25.232546.12357@portia.Stanford.EDU> <1990Oct26.072420.28005@cec1.wustl.edu> <90300.133611JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: Department of Biology at University of Chicago
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In article <90300.133611JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET> JAHAYES@MIAMIU.BITNET
(Josh Hayes) writes:
>Bathybias: The primeval slime at the bottom of the ocean, under
>the hypothesis that life becomes more primitive the deeper you
>go: fish and whales at the top, then squids, shrimp, slimy things
>that crawl upon the slimy seas (whoops, started Riming there :-).
>Proposed, then found, by Ernst Haeckel, if memory serves. Brought
>up water samples from the abyss, stuck it all in alcohol to preserve
>the life, and later found it to be this jelly-like gook: bathybias.

	Well, since slime grows on the bottoms of bathtubs if they aren't
cleaned often enough, it stands to reason that it would for sure grow on the
bottom of the ocean. . . :-)

	Actually, we may find the stuff after all.  The mid-ocean ridges cover
a fair amount of Earth's surface (I forgot the numbers, but I think it was
somewhere between 10% and 20% of the area).  Mid-ocean ridges are good sources
of hot water, and many hydrothermal vents in the mid-ocean ridges have been
found to support extensive communities of life whose primary producers are
chemotrophs rather than phototrophs.  (Unfortunately, the presence of oxygen
in the sea water greatly distorts the picture that one can get at the sea
bottom, due to the great profitability of conducting reactions of oxygen with
chemicals from the vents, but other kinds of chemotrophic communities do just
fine without oxygen (and in fact most to all of the organisms in such
communities cannot even tolerate oxygen).)

	At any rate, in two out of the three lineages of known terrestrial
life -- bacteria and archaebacteria, and especially the latter -- the trend
seems to be that growth at high temperatures correlates to a noticeable extent
with the combination of slow evolution and deep phylogenetic divergence,
which -- when the deeply-diverging organisms have a lot in common
phenotypically, which they do -- implies greater resemblence to ancestral
forms of life.  The mid-ocean ridges seem likely to harbor great (-: and
slimy :-) masses of such primitive organisms, since it seems likely that they
have much more hot water under them than comes out of the hydrothermal vents
at a time.

	I was going to redirect followups to sci.bio, but the reactions which
many of these (and other) microorganisms perform to get energy may be of
sufficient interest to justify keeping a foothold for this thread in sci.chem.

--
|   Lucius Chiaraviglio    |    Internet:  chi9@midway.uchicago.edu