Oh wow!
Grab that.
It’s like fishing.
Aren’t they cute?
They’re so dead, yes. Well, we did just decompress them from 1,600 meters.
So these are all from three different iron sites.
One of the samples had a lot of fluffy mat.
This is a fluffy sample and this is the rocky sample.
Or, not so fluffy.
So we’re looking for these Zetaproteobacteria, the iron oxidizers.
So you can see how orange these are, so that’s iron oxide.
And you can even see particulates in there.
I’m interested in microbes growing specifically on the rocks.
Seafloor basalt and silicates in general is the largest continuous habitat on the planet.
And it’s also, there tends to be pretty high biomass at the seafloor,
so understanding who’s there, what they’re doing, and how quickly they’re doing those things has important implications for kind of understanding the global carbon cycle.
This is the side that I’ve taken off. It’s like a little curtain. And there it is on the other side.
And then it filters the water through this, there’s the little hole, here.
And that goes up into the stomach, which is up in through here, underneath.
This is when the geologist says, “ew.”
Well done. On cue.