Few people know that 300 kilometres off the West Coast of Vancouver Island, lies a chain
of underwater volcanoes, known as the Juan de Fuca ridge.
Part of this region was established as a Marine Protected Area in 2003.
This is where we find deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
So hydrothermal vents are located at mid ocean ridges.
So picture it as seams along a baseball and when you go away from these seams it's almost
like the desert.
There is not really much life there.
It's called the abyssal plain so it just looks like mud flats going on and on and on.
When you get closer to these little seams on the baseball at the hydrothermal vents
you see an abundance of life.
Hydrothermal vents form when two plates are separating away from each other and new crust
from the Earth's centre starts migrating upwards.
You'll have water that percolates through this really super-hot crust and from pressure
and both temperature it'll come back up and start precipitating these minerals out, once
it reaches that cold seafloor.
So you'll get these precipitations slowly start forming these hydrothermal chimneys
and once the temperatures as well as the right conditions are available for new animals they'll
start colonizing these hydrothermal vents.
So we can go from a volcanic eruption that essentially flattens everything to the beginnings
of a vent ecosystem with a number of species within less than a year.
They're at depths usually between fifty and one hundred metres to up to four thousand
metres below the sea surface.
So basically no sun can penetrate these environments.
It's in complete darkness.
The ambient seawater is usually about two degrees at those depths but at these hydrothermal
vents you're getting these just like picture underwater volcanoes, they're spewing out
these hot vent fluids that are up to four hundred degrees Celsius in some cases.
They're extremely toxic so you have hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, methane, so for you
and I there's no way we'd be able to survive at these hydrothermal vents.
Wow, pretty extreme conditions at these deep-sea vents.
How can anything actually live there?
You're on an underwater volcano where there's absolutely nothing alive and then boom you
come across this little oasis of life with colour, reds, blues and animals you've never
seen before.
Everything we brought up had never been seen by a scientist before.
Bottom few hundred metres of water contains millions of larva of vent animals that have
been released by vent ecosystems in the surrounding area.
These larvae are constantly looking for, urgently looking for, a new place to settle down.
They detect the vent environment, they come in, settle down on the seafloor and transform
into juveniles and then adult animals.
So they can colonize in a matter of months.
Most of the animals that live there are unusually tolerant of high temperatures, toxic hydrogen
sulfide and even heavy metals.
There's a really limited number of species that can colonize hydrothermal vents but those
that can really cut it do really well.
We find incredible biomass in this environment even though there are very small number of
species.
Some of the more common animals at hydrothermal vents in the North Pacific are the giant tubeworms.
These are large worms that can be up to 2 metres in length.
They have no mouth, no digestive system.
The only way that they can exchange anything with the outside world is through their gills.
They survive by the symbiotic relationship with bacteria and essentially what they do
is uptake this bacteria into an internal organ called the trophosome and the trophosome houses
all these bacteria.
And if you have seen a picture of a tubeworm they have these red bushy plumes at the anterior
portion of their body and they uptake these dissolved gases which are toxic to you and
I so it would by hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide as well as oxygen and essentially
this feeds the internal bacteria that provide the sole and only nutrition for the tube worms.
Hydrothermal vents are a highly ephemeral environment and by ephemeral I mean it's very
dynamic in vents are shutting off and then turning back on and starting up in a new location
or even vents can shut off and then turn back on again at the same location later on.
So life itself at these vents that are turning off usually end up collapsing or dying but
then you'll see them pop up at these new hydrothermal vents and recolonize new areas.
So it's very dynamic and its constantly circling around as they die out they'll recolonize
new vents again.
Today we have a chance to learn more about hydrothermal vents and the unique species
that live there.
Thanks to the team at Ocean Networks Canada and thanks to you for being part of our ongoing
explorations here at Ocean Alive!