I’m incredibly fortunate to go out on oceanographic voyages
and see environments that nobody has ever seen before.
One unique environment that we’re studying in the deep ocean now
are these places called hydrothermal vents.
So although they appear to be very toxic and very harsh environments,
these are heated and chemically enriched hot springs on the sea floor.
Bacteria that grow there can sustain life in incredible abundances,
independently of the Sun’s energy.
What we don’t know is how recently these animals have adapted
to live on hydrothermal vents.
We know that hydrothermal vents have been around on our planet for at least four billion
years. And the oldest fossils from hydrothermal vents
that we know about are 440 million years old.
So there’s a really long history of animal occupation of these environments.
Working with my colleague Maggie, we realised we had an amazing opportunity to
perhaps compare the animals living at hydrothermal vents now with ancient fossil animals.
So when some of the initial discoveries were made of animals at vents,
it suggested that perhaps hydrothermal vents have acted as refuges
for certain animals over hundreds of millions of years.
But actually when I compare the fossil and modern specimens,
we are finding that the modern hydrothermal vent animals have more recent origins.
Perhaps vents aren’t such a difficult environment for animals to adapt to.
So this is a tremendously important discovery. We’ve started now to realise that hydrothermal
vent animals have been able to evolve and adapt to the hydrothermal vent system
quite rapidly, and many times over the world’s oceans.
These hydrothermal vents have acted as a sort of evolutionary pump,
continuously driving the novel evolution of animals at these systems.
The adaptations that we find within hydrothermal vent environments are quite unique.
So it might be argued that hydrothermal vent communities are worth preserving
because of their evolutionary novelty.
So really it’s become ever more important to understand the adaptation of life
in these unique environments, to get to the bottom of how life is continuously adapting
to environmental changes to our planet today.