Science at FMNH -- Exploring Unknown Deep Sea Ecosystems

Welcome to Science at FMNH, a podcast and video series that explores the behind-the-scenes science, collections, and research at Chicago's Field Museum. We continue our discussion with Janet Voigt to explore deep sea ecosystems and her research on deep sea marine invertebrates. I'm Janet Voigt, an associate curator of zoology here at the Field Museum. Well, I work in the deep sea, as opposed to most people in zoology who historically have worked on land-based systems or even shallow water systems. But for me, it's the 70 percent of the world that's covered by deep oceans. One of the experiments I developed was to put pieces of wood down on the sea floor and see what recruited to them over a period of 10 months and then over 24 months or two years. When I came back after 10 months, it didn't look too good. I mean, I got some animals but not a lot. The glorious thing was after 24 months, a full ecosystem had developed. There were animals that scraped the wood, bored into it with shells. These are wood-boring clams. There were animals on most of the pieces of wood that ate the wood-boring clams. There were animals who just liked to have hard spot in the middle to live, in the middle of the sediment-laden abyssal plain. And there were animals who just seemed to like to be there. So that community, if you will, that ecosystem is dynamic. It's the interaction of the physical wood that's on the bottom, the actions of the animals that destroy the system, the predators that eat the animals that destroy the system, and the animals that need that wood to live on it to be happy. And because there's so many different phylum, that is a basic division of the animal kingdom, on these woodfall communities, I've decided to specialize on the boring clams themselves. That is the clams that actually use their shells, grind into the wood, and eat the wood shavings that they then use endosymbionic bacteria to digest. Just like termites can't actually eat wood without the help of endosymbionts in their gut, these clams can't digest cellulose either. So far I've described, I think it's eight or ten species, which is about 20% of the world's total known species. Essentially these blocks of wood, even at 2,000 meters deep and two degrees Celsius, about 36 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, attracted a full community of animals who only existed on wood that had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Now in order to study that community, all I had to do was to get a submersible, either the Alvin or a remotely operated vehicle, to go down, find the piece of wood, take a hydraulic arm, pick it up, and put it in a box on the sub, and then close the box and bring it back up. The cost of a submersible is phenomenal, and finding a piece of wood a foot and a half long in the bottom of the ocean can be really, really hard. However, navigation has progressed so phenomenally well that the last piece of wood we were looking for, we came within three meters, nine feet of finding it. Is what I'm studying now the way it was back in 1860, when people actually felt there was no life on the bottom of the sea floor? Educated people could not envision that animal life could live in the cold, in the dark, and under the phenomenally high pressure of the whole system. Is it important that we know what's down there in the deep sea? I think it is. I think there's more biodiversity on our own planet than we're ever going to find in the rest of the solar system. The whole 70 percent of the earth that's carried by deep oceans has not been seen by people. We honestly don't know what's down there. All of my experiments have been done within 24 hours cruise from major ports. You got to say, what's in the Pacific Ocean? Don't you?