Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urk]

Check out this nice BBC document about things found in worlds largest caves:
http://www.123video.nl/playvideos.asp?MovieID=728877

It seems that one of the major challenges for things living in deep caves is getting reliable food/nutrients - some things have found their solutions though.

Video is one of "Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series" or something, i found it here: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/planet-earth-the-complete-bbc-series/

[Maklak]

Thanks. Animals look disgusting, but limestone with spikes of calcite looks wonderous.

[Tharwen]

There is also a type of caterpillar that lives on the ceiling of dark caves and extends a sticky silk thread to catch small creatures and pull them up.

Then it slowly devours them.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[BronzeElemental]

Caves are really cool but the things that live in them are really disgusting.

[FGK dwarf]

Scientists recently found nematode worms living in fractures in rock 2 miles underground:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20534-goldmine-worm-shows-animals-could-be-living-on-mars.html
They're only half a millimetre long, but it's pretty amazing that stuff can live down there.

BBC documentaries are some of the best. One of my favourites is the first in the living planet series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJfWCpUP02w
The graphics look really dated now, but it's still good. Watch it all the way through for magma, hot springs, lava tubes and exploding volcanoes!

[LordSlowpoke]

It interests me how do they find that stuff. Do they casually dig a mile into the ground, stop, look for any wildlife, and dig some more? Send Indiana Jones-esque expeditions to caves? The second one is actually believable but how did they find those worms really.

[FGK dwarf]

It interests me how do they find that stuff. Do they casually dig a mile into the ground, stop, look for any wildlife, and dig some more? Send Indiana Jones-esque expeditions to caves? The second one is actually believable but how did they find those worms really.

They were found in gold mines, they didn't just randomly dig a hole to look for wildlife! Many boreholes are dug for research purposes, but usually for mineral prospecting I think; I suspect it's too expensive to dig them on the off chance that you'll find some bacteria or worms down there. But once you've got the mines, boreholes, or whatever dug, it would be a simple matter to start looking for creatures.

It says in the New Scientist article that "Carbon dating of compounds dissolved in the water suggests that the worms have been living at these depths for between 3000 and 12,000 years." So they haven't just been recently introduced by the miners.

[LordSlowpoke]

It interests me how do they find that stuff. Do they casually dig a mile into the ground, stop, look for any wildlife, and dig some more? Send Indiana Jones-esque expeditions to caves? The second one is actually believable but how did they find those worms really.

They were found in gold mines, they didn't just randomly dig a hole to look for wildlife! Many boreholes are dug for research purposes, but usually for mineral prospecting I think; I suspect it's too expensive to dig them on the off chance that you'll find some bacteria or worms down there. But once you've got the mines, boreholes, or whatever dug, it would be a simple matter to start looking for creatures.

It says in the New Scientist article that "Carbon dating of compounds dissolved in the water suggests that the worms have been living at these depths for between 3000 and 12,000 years." So they haven't just been recently introduced by the miners.

I did indeed read the articles before writing that but the implication that they actually dug a hole to look for worms is better than just they waltzed down to a gold mine and suddenly worms. Should have put that in a spoiler or something.

[FGK dwarf]

I did indeed read the articles before writing that but the implication that they actually dug a hole to look for worms is better than just they waltzed down to a gold mine and suddenly worms. Should have put that in a spoiler or something.

Actually now I think about it there is at least one borehole whose primary purpose is to find life: Lake Vostok in Antarctica is covered by 2 miles of ice, and a Russian team has been drilling slowly through it to see what lives in the liquid water beneath:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok
Conditions in Lake Vostok may be similar to conditions beneath the icy surfaces of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, so discovery of life here would be particularly interesting...

[celem]

I was also amazed recently to read some document about bacteria that live in valcanos in 0 oxygen environments.  They eat pure heat energy and crap ammonia....

The world is weird.