As the ROV descends, we start to see this plume of black smoke, and we're like, yes,
we found it! And then this huge chimney comes into view and it's just packed with giant two worms
Everybody was out of their seats in the control room taking pictures
of the screens with our phones we looked like a bunch of tourists. We were.
My name is Shannon Johnson and I'm a research technician at MBARI
and I'm one of the few people in the world who's been lucky enough to visit
many of the most beautiful hydrothermal vents around the world.
Hydrothermal vents are probably one of the most extreme places on earth to live.
It's basically an underwater volcano. We would definitely melt apart if we were down in this area
and yet, they're inhabited by these amazing creatures.
Vents are very special places in the ocean. They act like these little island oases of food for
animals because a lot of the bottom of the ocean is just blood there's no sun there's no light
at all. It's completely pitch black and these animals that are living on hydrothermal vents.
They're completely reliant on the system called chemosynthesis, where bacteria are being fed by
minerals coming out of the bottom of the ocean rather than sunlight coming down from the sky.
And all the animals and hydrothermal vents are reliant on the bacteria for nutrition.
Riftia pachyptila are these giant tube worms and they're kind of the poster
child of hydrothermal vents. They're often four feet tall, so they're very imposing figures in
the deep sea. They have no mouth, no gut and instead have this beautiful red plume
that they use for gas exchange. That's their gills. They pull minerals out of the water and
deliver those to bacteria inside of their bodies and the bacteria feed the worms.
The zoarcid fishes are these really cool fishes that live in and amongst the Riftia tubeworms.
The Riftia are not bothered at all by the zoarcids because the zoarcids just help clean them and keep
the parasites and things off of them, like the clownfish helps the anemone. Alvinella pompejana
are the coolest little worms. They look like little fuzzy wuzzy stuffed animals. They have
a fleece-like coating of bacteria that helps protect them from some of the hottest water that
comes out of the vents. They extend their gills out into much cooler water and they
do this little dance in between the cooler water and the hotter water. In and out of their tubes
so that they can go into the hot part and extract minerals from the vents and then
go back out into the cooler water and extract oxygen out of the water. So they're like hot,
hot, hot, cool, cool, cool. There's nowhere else really like it on earth, where you have
these amazing creatures that live right up close to these really extreme environments.
Every time we go to sea, we learn new things and find new discoveries. New species, new places,
and it's so important to keep going back out there and doing exploration and discovery.