10-Centimeter Single-Celled Organisms Photographed 6 Miles Underwater 134
New submitter roat35 tips news that researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have used Dropcam — a relatively small, glass-walled device containing an HD camera — to make videos of lifeforms that exist in the Mariana Trench, more than six miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. One of the more interesting organisms at those depths is the Xenophyophore, a creature which, despite being single-celled, can grow to be over 10 centimeters wide.
"Scientists say xenophyophores are the largest individual cells in existence. Recent studies indicate that by trapping particles from the water, xenophyophores can concentrate high levels of lead, uranium and mercury and are thus likely highly resistant to large doses of heavy metals. They also are well suited to a life of darkness, low temperature and high pressure in the deep sea."
Heavy metals? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't be the only one thinking that an organism that is simple and can absorb heavy metals sounds almost too good to be true. Sounds like something that *could* be easy (in relative terms) to genetically modify for cleaning up toxic areas.
Yes, I know, what could possibly go wrong...
Re:Heavy metals? (Score:5, Funny)
I can't be the only one thinking that an organism that is simple and can absorb heavy metals sounds almost too good to be true. Sounds like something that *could* be easy (in relative terms) to genetically modify for cleaning up toxic areas.
My neighbour's teenager absorbs great quantities of heavy metal every day (to the dismay of the entire neighborhood), doesn't seem to possess an IQ much higher than a single cell organism, lives in a toxic area he calls his "bedroom", and I can guarantee you no amount of genetic engineering is likely to convince him to clean it...
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Can you recall the exact moment you morphed into a caricature from an 80s comedy movie, or did it happen gradually?
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Can you recall the exact moment you morphed into a caricature from an 80s comedy movie, or did it happen gradually?
Can you remember the exact moment you forgot what a "joke" was?
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I can't be the only one thinking that an organism that is simple and can absorb heavy metals sounds almost too good to be true. Sounds like something that *could* be easy (in relative terms) to genetically modify for cleaning up toxic areas.
My neighbour's teenager absorbs great quantities of heavy metal every day (to the dismay of the entire neighborhood), doesn't seem to possess an IQ much higher than a single cell organism, lives in a toxic area he calls his "bedroom", and I can guarantee you no amount of genetic engineering is likely to convince him to clean it...
What you don't seem to understand is that heavy metal music was written by people with very high IQ's as a way to hack young minds into annoying the shit out of people like yourself.
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What you don't seem to understand is that
what you're responding to is a joke.
I guess my humor can be dry sometimes, it's not as if I was being serious
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I at least have yet to meet a heavy-metal listener using his phone's speaker to "listen" to music.
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Yes, it's a funny joke. But even 20 years after high school, I can see how these stereotypes can hit a nerve. Imagine being labeled a "Devil Worshiper" by classmates just because you like Metallica - only to hear the same classmates singing Enter Sandman a year later when the Black album became mainstream. Or try not being able to walk into a department store wearing leather and a Slayer shirt without getting a "Company escort" following five feet behind you the whole time you browsed.
Re:Heavy metals? (Score:5, Interesting)
How would we go about genetically modifying it to not require 6 miles of water ontop of it?
Generally deep sea stuff tends to explode once we bring it up due to pressure differential.
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Good point, for sure, but the real question is, does it require 6 miles, could it be cloned above water (we are talking single cell, and we have done sheep, dogs, etc.). The main thing that makes my ears perk up is the fact that it is such a simple organism, the odds of us being able to figure it out is much higher.
Maybe not, but an interesting organism nonetheless, and at the least, there is something we can likely learn from it. I would bet some company somewhere is asking the same question. When the p
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It's a single-celled organism, allegedly, but I don't necessarily see that as being the same as "simple". The biochemical complexity of some of the smallest of bacteria is still very high, while some of the largest of viruses (mimivirus et al), which one would expect to be "simple", have genomes considerably larger than some "complex" bacteria.
Re:Heavy metals? (Score:5, Funny)
Easy, lets dump the contaminated material on the sea and call it food for Xenophyophores
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Well, for vertebrates it is more complex than that. Those lipids that line your cells? The ones that have just the right viscosity at the pressure you live at? How do they behave at depth?
How do lipids that are fluid enough to function within a single-celled organism at depth (>15,000 psi) behave when they are brought up to our measly ~14psi?
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Yes, but as the pressure gets lower, it necessarily get larger until you have
The BLOB!!!
Beware of The Blob, it creeps
And leaps and glides and slides
Across the floor
Right through the door
And all around the wall
A splotch, a blotch
Be careful of The Blob
{G} - Pug
Re:Heavy metals? (Score:5, Funny)
>> How would we go about genetically modifying it to not require 6 miles of water ontop of it?
We could mate it with a Giraffe. Those don't have to be underwater to live.
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Interesting to contemplate how you're going to get the two of them together. :D
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I will send you a bill for a new keyboard. My current one is covered in coffee. :D
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Generally deep sea stuff tends to explode once we bring it up due to pressure differential.
Only if you bring it up quickly. There's no problem if you give the dissolved gases time to escape.
Re:Heavy metals? (Score:4, Interesting)
The pressure difference isn't such an issue, the pressure differential for a single celled organism should equalize fairly well - it likely won't explode/rupture.
The temperatures will be an issue. Many chemical reactions may fail.
Also, certain reactions may actually require the high pressure.
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Equally, shallow-sea stuff (humans adapted to 0m +/-1.5m water depth) tends to collapse once taken to more than 10m depth if compressed rapidly enough and to leak bodily fluids if taken rapidly to high altitudes.
Almost everything doesn't like rapid pressure changes. Many organisms however can withstand considerable changes of pressure over a fair duration.
Actually, I can extend that to inorganic materials too : stan
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Removal and disposal of the now, toxic, organisms is the problem...
They do this with the common water hyacinth. It's great for cleaning up heavy metals and many chemicals, but then you have many thousands of lbs of heavy, wet, plants to remove and do something with before they eventually die, decompose, and release everything back into the water.
Re:Heavy metals? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Heavy metals? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Monsanto could ask some its folks to adapt hyacinth to make some kind of container like a gourd or coconut? Object would be to have the plant store its gathered heavy metals in there, then harvest the stuff maybe wearing a Bio-Suit?
Maybe we could just have Monsanto executives eat the heavy metals directly & save the rest of the world a lot of trouble...
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I think you missed the point. GP was referring to giving 'em the 9mm cure, a course i heartily agree with.
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9mm? Come on, at least a .45! If its worth doing, its worth doing well...
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Doesn't the MP5 take 9mm? Isn't that like a common weapon in the military?
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Maybe it would be cool to have the gourds or coconuts break off after absorbing the toxins, and then float to the surface. They could be harvested more easily...maybe.
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This is relatively easy to solve, though. You put them in a bio-bag and get methane out. The heavy metals accumulate at the bottom. Or you can grind them up and use AIWPS to turn them into methane and algae.
Re:Heavy metals? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't be the only one thinking that an organism that is simple and can absorb heavy metals sounds almost too good to be true. Sounds like something that *could* be easy (in relative terms) to genetically modify for cleaning up toxic areas.
Yes, I know, what could possibly go wrong...
There are actually lots of microbes that metabolize and break down toxic wastes. Typically they are found simply by digging into a pile of hazardous waste and seeing what is growing there. The problem is that these organisms don't have to be particularly fast or efficient to defend their niche, they just need to survive where other's can't, so in their natural state they will not make a significant difference on the timescales convenient to us (i.e. a 1,000 year cleanup). So we need to at least understand enough to genetically engineer a yugo into a porche, and that isn't exactly easy.
The second catch here is that deep sea life also typically has extremely slow metabolisms to begin with compared to terrestrial organisms. You can't spend energy faster than you take it in, and that's very slow indeed on the ocean floor. Fish down there are adapted to months inbetween feedings and can live for many decades, I can only imagine how slowly these 10 cm blobs eat and reproduce.
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The solution to this is simple. In fact, people have been doing it for thousands of years: selective breeding. Take your landfill bacteria sample. Break it up into groups, and give each group some toxins to nosh on. The group that performs best gets cultured and split up again. All others get culled. Repeat. This technique was already proven in a 16 year old's science project. [mnn.com]
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The solution to this is simple. In fact, people have been doing it for thousands of years: selective breeding. Take your landfill bacteria sample. Break it up into groups, and give each group some toxins to nosh on. The group that performs best gets cultured and split up again. All others get culled. Repeat. This technique was already proven in a 16 year old's science project. [mnn.com]
Yes, that would be the standard operating procedure for an organism with a rapid generation time (20 minutes for e. coli) and culturable in a lab (so you can control the nutrient conditions and do your selective breeding). I can't find any information on the generation time of Xenophyophores, in fact it may not be known, but I would be shocked if it was quicker than months to years per generation. And something that only lives on the sea floor is probably the hardest conditions I can think of (until alien
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So, now what? You have just as much mercury as before. Only now it is in lots o
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Largest single cells (Score:5, Interesting)
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Came here to say this, not sure if an egg properly qualifies as an organism.
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Came here to say this, not sure if an egg properly qualifies as an organism.
Ostrich egg+sperm immediately after fertilization.
(Still doesn't count, because the organisms typical life cycle does not have it staying as a single cell.)
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It also doesn't count because the ostrich egg, like any other bird egg, contains, but is not, the egg which turns into an embryo. The vast majority of that egg is a food dump for the chick.
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An ostrich egg is 13-15 centimeters [wikipedia.org] and is considered a cell; however, I think the scientists here are referring to this species being the largest single-celled organism. The ostrich egg isn't an organism and, IMO, doesn't qualify as life since it doesn't consume energy, reproduce, etc, but simply provides and environment for the multicelluar life to grow within it. It is definitely a single-cell, however, and so the article is technically inaccurate in its verbiage.
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Now now... (Score:5, Funny)
Let's not get into that whole "who's xenophyophore is longer" thing, guys.
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An ostrich egg is 13-15 centimeters [wikipedia.org] and is considered a cell
No it isn't! Have you not done any biology or science at school whatsoever? It's an egg, it's an organism, but it's millions and millions of cells!
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At what time? I think the question is.
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What about ostrich eggs?
The single-cell "egg" (zygote? that doesn't sound like the right term...) inside that egg is still microscopic and can't be seen with the unaided eye. No where near 1 mm, let alone 1 or 10 cm.
The rest of the stuff making up the egg (shell, yolk-food, and other fluids), is more than one cell.
Re:Largest single cells (Score:5, Interesting)
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If there are no other cells in the egg, and the yolk doesn't partake in cell division, what does? Obviously some cells in there are dividing in order for a chick to develop.
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An ostrich egg isn't an organism. The title goes to the Caulerpa [wikipedia.org], a kind of seaweed whose single cell can grow up to a meter in length.
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Slime Mold is more interesting as during their development there are moments when the whole slime mold is a single cell, but with thousands of nuclei, which stretches the concept of a cell to its boundaries.
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Can we call them Dwarf Bandersnatchi? (Score:3)
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That's the FIRST thing that came to my mind! Perhaps it is best that they live 10,000 meters below the surface...
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The Tnuctipun must have been here at some point,
R.I.P. Vulcan Comrades (Score:1)
It's the Leviathan! (Score:2)
You guys have read the Illuminatus! trilogy, right?
But can they handle silver? (Score:1)
Mixing metric and imperial (Score:5, Informative)
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Fair point, but I'm just pleased they didn't use fathoms. What are they, four and seven eights hogsheads?
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Quite frankly I prefer crafting my own custom units to fit the situation. They are typically 1 xenophophum wide, and typically found at a depth of 1 xenophyohom.
I can provide definitions, dimensions, and conversion factors if anyone needs them.
Oh yes? (Score:2)
"They also are well suited to a life of darkness, low temperature and high pressure in the deep sea."
Oh yes? Well... they better should be suited for that if they live in the Mariana Trench!!
D'oh!
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Sheesh. And I thought they'd be well suited to sun bathing and the vacuum of space. Nature is one huge surprise after another.
Trying to come up with a rigorous definition of well adapted blows my mind. Although I can recall some classmates who were better adapted to junior high school that I was or aspired to be; perhaps "well adapted" hints at sad and pathetic when encountered later in life.
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"They also are well suited to a life of darkness, low temperature and high pressure in the deep sea."
Oh yes? Well... they better should be suited for that if they live in the Mariana Trench!!
D'oh!
No no, you misunderstand. They're literally suited for it... by wearing tiny little pressure suits.
So, get to the point, how does it taste? (Score:3, Funny)
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For some reason... (Score:5, Funny)
It doesn't surprise me all that much that the fattest single-celled organism on the planet lives in the deepest, darkest place on Earth and is a fan of heavy metal.
Re:For some reason... (Score:4, Funny)
How are they not preyed upon? (Score:2)
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have they found George W Bush (Score:2)
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You can relax. He's not running for president. The guy who thinks there are such things as transcontinental railroads, 57 US states, and similar things (which, if W had said them, would have sent you into a shuddering orgasm of
No. (Score:2)
those scientists had better be careful... (Score:3)
These are giant amoebas! I think HP Lovecraft warned about giant bags of protoplasm from deep beneath the sea like these.
Yes, by all means, bring those infant shoggoth up here for study... preferably in heavily populated areas!
Genetically engineer them? Sure! What could possibly go wrong?!
(Note, this is meant to be funny.)
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We'll see who's laughing when those experiments go horribly awry.
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We'll see who's laughing when those experiments go horribly awry.
Me, I'll be laughing. And stroking my white cat. In my volcano lair.
DropCam is SO COOL! (Score:3)
I mean it's like a reverse space probe (goes down instead of up) but it makes a "soft" landing and then "liftoff" to return to orbit (I mean the recovery ship). Because (I think) it's not tethered it's completely autonomous which makes it like a Mars probe in the sense that all landing decisions must be done without human intervention (because in the case of the Mars probe, the 10 min. delay makes real time control impossible).
It's really too bad that there are no (?) feasible ways of communicating with it short of a fiber-optic cable. At a minimum 6 miles run length, I suppose this would greatly add to the complexity and cost of the mission. But maybe I'm wrong about this, what "high" bandwidth wireless solutions are there for transmitting underwater? I've seen SCUBA divers communicating with full face masks, do they use some sort of hydro-sonic transceiver? Would this work over a distance of miles? Unlike military applications, there's no need for stealth so maybe there are some overlooked solutions.
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I wonder if you might use sound, but from a phased-array emitter, as is done in modern radar. IIRC, low sound frequencies propagate well in seawater and the higher the frequency, the greater the attenuation. From bandwidth perspective, you'd like to use a higher frequency. The phased-array emitter would let you concentrate the sound into a narrow beam to help overcome attenuation. Maybe some kind of cooperative emitter/DropCam interaction could help keep the beam on target as the camera descends and ris
if a single cell organism is 10 centimeters (Score:1)
we could have the Leviathan mentioned in the bible be a real creature hiding in the depths of the trench or some other giant beast :)
would be cool...
release the kracken!
Beware of large one-celled organisms. (Score:3, Funny)
pre-Cambrian sizes (Score:4, Interesting)
Ediacaran-era (pre-Cambrian) life-forms may be single-celled, but many scientists call them "multi-cellular" without question due their size. Since there are no known living relatives of Ediacarans, it's hard to say. Fossils don't preserve enough details. The possibility of them being single-celled is still fairly strong.
So, centimetres or miles? (Score:2)
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The one holding the ruler was canadian, but the one working the wench and line was american, go figure...these international explorations need to have some sort of standard!!!
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Except, the guy who decided to measure the distance to the bottom of the ocean floor using a different way (miles!)
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You're right. It should be measured in leagues, as in, "20,000 leagues under the sea."
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Neat, but blob? (Score:2)
Isnt that where we placed the blob when it got too huge, we threw it into the ocean, and now someone went and dug it up.....oh noss.
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The ostrich egg isn't an organism; the Caulerpa [wikipedia.org], on the other hand, is. Up to a meter in length.
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I assume he's referring to neurons. Those can become quite long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Anatomy_and_histology [wikipedia.org]
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I would imagine the size limit is not fixed, but related to the organisms metabolic rate. If these cells have unusually slow metabolisms then an unusual size would be possible.