Image courtesy of Biance Dal Bó
Joel Kontinen
Could a sizable
amount of methane be harmful for us and the world? Now it seems that a Sea-spiders
species kills off methane. This was probably brought off by intelligent design that want to keep us going strong.
Spider-like
creatures living near methane seeps on the seafloor appear to cultivate and
consume microbial species on their bodies that feed on the energy-rich gas.
This expands the set of organisms known to rely on symbiotic relationships with
microbes to live in these otherworldly environments.
Shana
Goffredi at Occidental College in California and her colleagues collected
sea spiders – marine arthropods named for their resemblance to arachnids –
living near three different methane seeps in the Pacific Ocean. They found
three previously unknown species from the sea spider genus Sericosura that
appear to be abundant only near these gas seeps.
Other types
of sea spiders that don’t live near seeps largely eat other invertebrates. But
the researchers found the new sea spiders appear to get most of their nutrition
by eating a distinctive set of bacterial species that live on their bodies.
These bacteria harvest energy by metabolising methane and methanol coming from
the seeps, energy that would otherwise be inaccessible to the sea spiders.
The
researchers found the bacteria were confined to the spiders’ exoskeletons like
a “microbial fur coat”, growing in what Goffredi describes as “volcano-like”
clusters. The layers of bacterial growth also had markings like lawnmower
tracks where the spiders may have munched on them using their hard “lips” and
three tiny teeth.
To confirm
the sea spiders really were eating the bacteria, the researchers also used a
radioactive labelling technique to track how the carbon in methane was consumed
by the sea spiders in the lab. “We watched that methane go into the microbes
that are on the surface of the spiders, and then we watched that carbon
molecule move into the tissues of the spider,” says Goffredi.
Source:
James
Dinneen 2025
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