THEY may look like giant lipsticks, but tubeworms in hydrothermal vents in the Pacific Ocean know how to live it up. They can turn energy into food as fast as any creature on the planet, say researchers.
Riftia pachyptila has no mouth or gut, and instead of eating it relies on 鈥渃hemoautotrophic鈥� bacteria. Sunlight doesn鈥檛 reach the vents, so these bugs use energy from chemicals rather than the Sun to turn inorganic carbon into organic matter that the tubeworms can absorb as food. This partnership lets the worms grow as tall as 2 metres, though they only live a few years. 鈥淟ive fast, die hard. That鈥檚 sort of the Riftia approach,鈥� says Peter Girguis of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California.
The group collected tubeworms from vents about 250 kilometres off the Mexican coast, and transferred them to pressurised acrylic tubes. The researchers simply measured the decrease in inorganic carbon in each tube across a range of environmental conditions to work out how much organic carbon the tubeworms were absorbing.
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According to Girguis, Riftia can 鈥渇ix鈥� carbon at rates higher than anything else in the ocean, and as well as, if not better than many land plants. He says it was surprising to find that a chemoautotrophic system could compete with or even outdo those that rely on the Sun.
鈥淩iftia have always been superstars among tubeworms,鈥� says Kathleen Scott, a bacterial physiologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 exciting to hear that they may be superstars among all [primary producers].鈥�
