Ologies with Alie Ward - Deep Sea Microbiology (UNSEEN OCEAN CRITTERS) with Peter Girguis

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Creatures in inky trenches. Exploring the sea floor. Mud medicine. Tube worms. Harvard professor and Deep Sea Microbiology legend Dr. Peter Girguis tells tales of ocean expeditions and answers questions about extremophiles, life on other planets, Atlantis, shark encounters, methane munching, hydronauts, Trekkie trivia, the safety of submersibles, deep sea simulations, and how ocean organisms may just save your life.  Visit the Girguis Laboratory and follow Dr. Girguis on Google Scholar A donation went to the National Immigration Law Center More episode sources and links Other episodes you may enjoy: Oceanology (OCEANS), Teuthology (SQUIDS), Medusology (JELLYFISH), Toxinology (JELLYFISH VENOM), Benthopelagic Nematology (DEEP SEA WORMS), Ichthyology (FISHES), Tardigradology (TINY SEMI-INDESTRUCTIBLE WATER BEAR MOSS PIGLET CREATURES CALLED TARDIGRADES), Evolutionary Biology (DARWINISM), Maritime Archaeology (SHIPWRECKS) 400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topic Smologies (short, classroom-safe) episodes Sponsors of Ologies Transcripts and bleeped episodes Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes! Follow Ologies on Instagram and Bluesky Follow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTok Editing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake Chaffee Managing Director: Susan Hale Scheduling Producer: Noel Dilworth Transcripts by Aveline Malek  Website by Kelly R. Dwyer Theme song by Nick Thorburn   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, hello. If you are hearing this before September 8th, 2026, and you live anywhere near Atlanta, Georgia, just a heads up. I'm doing a free talk that's open to the public at Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, alongside wonderful meteorology guest, Dr. Marshall Shepard. And again, it's September 8th, 3 to 4 p.m. at the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. That's actually in Athens, Georgia. It's at their special collections library. September 8th, okay, I'll see you. Oh, hey, it's the flyer tucked under your windshield, flapping on the highway. Allie Ward, this one is another long time coming episode. I was tipped off about this ologist by my dear friend and squid expert, Dr. Sarah McAnulty of Skype

a scientist, who sang this fellow marine scientist praises. And as soon as I heard Critters of the Deep I was in, but wait, micro critters, is that a thing? Oh, you have no idea, but they do. So they got their bachelor's of science at UCLA, a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, and did a postdoc at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Legit. They switched coasts a few decades ago, and they are a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, while also being an adjunct scientist at Woods Hole. And at Harvard, they teach courses like deep sea biology and microbial sciences and also sea monsters, mythology, fiction, film and fact. absolute humdinger of a guest here. They research what is living and thriving in the places that are

hardest to reach on the planet. They also have a voice that was made for radio and tales from the deep that goosebumps me. So we're going to get into it. But first, if you need kid-friendly versions of Ologies, we have them for you in their own separate feed called Smologies. Just look for those on your favorite podcast app, S-M-O-L-G-I-E-S. Thank you to patrons of the show at patreon.com slash ologies for supporting for a dollar or more a month. Thank you to everyone out there in items from ologiesmerch.com. And thanks to everyone who rates the show and reviews. It helps so much. And yes, I read them all. And this one was just left by Lord Epe, who wrote, wonderful, wish there was more. Learning new things going in depth into such a variety of topics is always a joy. Would have given a sixth

star if you upload seven times as much. Lord Epe, Ologies is about to turn nine. We have over 500 episodes listed in different categories at ologies.com. If you've heard them all, I salute your rate of information consumption. I thank you for that seven times over. I think you should take over the podcast if I ever retire. Also, thank you to sponsors of Ologies who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the Ologist's choosing each week. Okay, let's go deep, deep, deep into unseen creatures lurking and inky trenches. What it's like, like to drift to the sea floor. How single-celled organisms also wait in line at buffets, tube worms, mud medicine, extremophiles, life on other planets. If we can go check out Atlantis,

shark encounters, methane munching, hydranots, Treki trivia, the safety of submersibles, deep sea simulations, and how ocean organisms may save your life with researcher, Harvard professor, and deep sea microbiologist Dr. Peter Gerges, he, him. This has been such a long time coming. What does your working space look like? I'm looking at behind you, and you have, like, the most professorial den with books and bookshelves and, like, beautiful Tiffany lamps. But what is your day-to-day look like?

Well, this is my basement, and, you know, this is my happy place. The lab is also my happy place. what does it look like? I think it's a bit Frankenstein-ish, sort of a bit steampunky. Okay. As a lab, what we love to do is understand how things that live in water, in particular the ocean, in particular the deep sea, like how do they make a living? Yeah. And to do that, we build systems that allow us to keep those animals and microbes at the conditions

that they live at. So one of the things I love about my lab and love about the lab members is all of them lean into this idea of saying, okay, we've got a question. Like we've got this question about this microbe or this animal. We want to study it under the most environmentally similar conditions possible. Let's build a high pressure reactor. So we've got high pressure pumps. We've got welding supplies. We've got drilling supplies.

We assemble all sorts of crazy things. And so it really smacks a little bit of that kind of Mary Shelley vibe. It's kind of got. You know, as we study these animals, we're really looking at what they breathe and what they give off. So we have a lot of analytical equipment, the kind of thing you might see in a blood testing lab. We have a molecular biology lab where, I swear to God, this is true, people spend most of their day moving little drops of water around, right, to get a genome. So I love this about the work we do. We run the gamut.

So what does field work look like then? How deep are the animals and the microbes that you're studying? Like how deep down there? And do they even have rovers to collect anything? How do you have access to these places on Earth? What a great question. And it's a great question because we go as deep as we need. do to study the questions that are at hand. Now, most of my research in the deep ocean has

orbited around these underwater volcanoes and hot springs. They are found primarily along what we call the mid-ocean ridge system. It's actually the longest mountain range. You look at the picture and it's like seams on a baseball, and that's where the different tectonic plates meet. So according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the mid-ocean ridge system is a really huge mountain range. So you know the Alps, right? 750 miles. The Andes, over 5,500 miles or 9,000 kilometers. The Rockies are about half that, 4,800 kilometers. Now, the mid-ocean ridge stretches 65,000 kilometers, 40,000 miles. Why don't you know about this? Because it's like 90% underwater. And it's volcano.

So some parts of the ridge under the Atlantic Ocean are as deep as the Grand Canyon. They're underwater mountains and canyons. It's nuts. And yeah, on a map, these things are gargantuan. They look like Frankenstein stitches near the rims of tectonic plates. And they split apart. They're getting wider and deeper every year. Now, that mountain range is full of underwater volcanoes.

And many of the ones we've studied are between 2,500 meters. deep, so, you know, call it a mile and a half or something around there, down to about twice that depth. So about 5,000 meters deep, you know, so now we're talking about a little over three miles. And most of the time we go down there with a robot. We sit on a ship, we send a robot down there and it collects our samples. But I absolutely love going in the Alvin submersible. That is a real treat, Ali. And we get in this little six-foot titanium ball myself and my Two buddies. Well, a pilot and another scientist, and we descend to the seafloor and hang out there for four hours or so. What? You've been in the Alvin.

Absolutely. How that is, it seems like an impossible vehicle to get access to. I feel like very few people will ever get to get in one of those. It is bonkers. It is bonkers. How big is it? Is it a minivan? Is it a geometro? I say it's absolutely not a geometro. Take a school bus, cut it in half, and you have something about the size of the Alvin. But half a school bus would hold, what, 20 kids, ballpark, 15 kids, right? This tinyish, relative to other submarines, this tiny submersible lives on a mothership called the Atlantis. So the Atlantis goes to where the submarine needs to do work.

They wheel out this sub that's about half a bus size. and it only holds three people. Because most of the submarine is batteries and flotation, so we get home. We crawl inside a titanium ball that is now a little over six feet tall. So I'm six to, and I can stand up in it, and my toes are on the bottom and my heads on the top. So in that ball are three people and all the life support and all the electronics. It's cozy. A lot of people get kind of unsettled by crawling in there.

I do not like small spaces like elevators, especially, but I tell you what, Ali, when you get in the Alvin, and you're sitting there for the first five minutes and your heart is racing, as soon as you get in the water, and it just dips beneath the service and you look out the windows, it is the most awe-inspiring experience of my life. I just, you forget about it. You just settle in.

If you can cross your legs and if you're enthralled by the ocean, you'd love an Alvin submersible ride. Oh, my God. What does it look like out those windows? And how long does it take to get to the bottom or do you reach the sediment at the bottom? No, we do. We do get to the bottom. You know, I was telling you most of my research is at these underwater hot springs, right? And typically to get there, it's about a two-hour trip.

So for the first two hours, we are sinking. we are not attached to the ship. We're a free-falling vehicle. And the way they do this is they strap some iron plates to the outside. And that makes us a little heavy. It's like a fishing weight, right? So it makes us heavy. And we think to the bottom.

That two hours is breathtaking because as you go deeper and deeper, there are so many creatures that live in the ocean that make their own light. And when you get down a couple of hundred meters, or about 600 or so feet, you have a little light show that's going on outside your window and it's straight out of, it blows the socks off of any fantastical movie scene

you've seen, you know, where there might be bioluminescent creatures, put all of that in the trash because nothing beats nature's life show. And for two hours, Allie, it's you, two other people, literally seeing creatures

that most humans, will never have a chance to see. And even though I do a lot of work on the seafloor, and I study the things that live in and on the mud and in and on rocks and microbes and all that, and even though I don't necessarily study all those jellies as much, I love the jellies and the bioluminescent fishes

and the creatures of the midwater because they just remind me this world is so much more than we realize, right? The biodiversity is mind-blowing. And if you do want to know more about those, creatures. You will love our toothology episode with the aforementioned Dr. Sarah McAnulty, as well as the jellyfish medusology episode with Dr. Rebecca Helm. We got a jellyfish venom episode with Dr. Anna Klompin. Or we got a benthopalagic nematology episode with Dr. Holly Bick about

Antarctic mudworms. So pelagic just means in the ocean and there are various depths like floors in a parking garage. Like epipelagic is at the top. It's like the lobby level, like epitermis. Mesopelagic is in the middle. Bathy pelagic is getting deeper. And then there's the super deep, the abyssal pelagic. And then past the super deep, you've got the Hedal Zone. So the underwater canyons and trenches. Benthopalagic means at the bottom. So let's have him explain more better than Mese. And then when you are looking for deep sea microbes, at what point are you like, okay, I've crossed a boundary and now this is my jurisdiction? So when we talk about the ocean, we do divide them into zones and we talk about the upper couple hundred meters as the epipelagic.

And that's where things are really kind of very nutrient rich. It's sort of what we're used to, right? Coral reefs, sharks, tuna, sea turtles, upper. 200 meters or 600 feet. When you get below that, you get into what we often call the mesopalagic or the twilight zone, right? In there is where light starts to get a little dimmer, and you can't really support a lot of photosynthetic algae and photosynthetic microbes the way you do in the surface waters. Because it's dark, like growing a house plant in the basement. When you get below a thousand meters, you are now beyond the reach of sunlight. Now, this is wild, because you're

Because let's just pause for a moment and think about this. Our planet, like all the life we know on it, is primarily fueled by a star. The sun. The sun irradiates Earth. Like all that sunlight hits Earth. And these photosynthetic organisms, algae, microbes, plants, they harness that energy.

And they create the organic matter that we animals, you and I and cows and lizards and sheep, all the things we eat, right? That's primary production. That's the science word for it. So our planet is fueled by a star. That's where we get our energy. But below 1,000 meters, all of that water is actually 80% or so of our planet's living space. Oh, wow.

80% of it? Right. In terms of cubic real estate, kind of? Yeah, exactly. Oh, I love that phrase. That's a new one, and I'm going to have to work that into lectures and a little copyright alley there. But I think it is exactly right. Cubic real estate, 80% of it is deep, dark, cold ocean beyond the reach of sunlight.

And everything else that we talk about is in the other 20%, right? All the coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, the tundra, the Great Plains, the Sarangeti, Boston, Los Angeles. All of that's in the other 20%. And so the majority of our planet's living space is deep, dark ocean, beyond the reach of sunlight. But many, though not all, of the animals and microbes down in that part of our world are fed by the food that comes down from the surface. Ah. Right? So a lot of what we study, Ali, what we're trying to figure out is how much of that food rains down, how much of it is eaten by animals, and how much of it gets buried and tucked away for all time.

people care about this a lot right now because of concerns about climate change and thinking about how do we take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere. And for better and for worse, people think about the deep sea like, hey, let's grow a bunch of algae and we'll go bury it in the deep ocean. And, you know, I think the verdict is still out on how well that will work because I'll get to microbes in a minute, but microbes, if there's food to be had, they're pretty much going to find it and they're going to eat it. So there's a lot of questions about how much organic matter we can actually bury without some microbe eating it and pumping it all back out of CO2, right?

Aha, yeah. So this deep ocean, though, as expansive as it is, thrives primarily off of the organic matter raining down. And I understand that's called marine snow, right? Sarah McAnnealty introduced me to that term. Absolutely. Marines, no, and that's just everything from whale fall to poop to tiny flakes of scales and plants, right? And more poop. And more poop, and then maybe it's poop. And snot. There's a lot of snot in the ocean. Yeah, you know, it's a marine snow is beautiful. And again, you know, anyone who's listening here can, if you want to take a peek, go to your favorite web browser type marine snow video. It looks like a starfield. It totally looks like straight out of, you know, a sci-fi show.

And then you realize, I'm looking at a toilet, you know. But one fish's poo is another fish's meal. Yes. Such as it is. Such as it is. Bon Appetit. And what about Whale Falls? Is that like going to Tokyo or New York in terms of microbes?

Is it just like a high density city center? things are happening, a lot of activity. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Whale falls are bananas, but also any big fall, you know, remember tuna die and great white sharks even die and they sink down. You know, a lot of these things that are big when they die, they can often sink often, but not always, a little more quickly, and they get to the bottom and it's a buffet. Let me pick up on the buffet analogy here. Life in the ocean, remember when we were talking about the different oceanic zones, the surface zone, the epipelagic to the bottom?

Yep. The food is best tasting at the surface. It's highest quality. It's fresh, right? But you're competing with a lot of other organisms for it. And once that food starts to sink, and if it's fish poo or the like, the ones that are a little deeper down have slightly better food. And then the ones that are even deeper down have, like slightly worse food and so on. Like, I like to think of it literally as a buffet line.

You go to a wedding. The first people at the start of the buffet, man, you know they're going for the shrimp and lobster. And those are the surface dwellers. And those that are in the middle of the line, they're going to get there, they're going to be like, okay, no more shrimp and lobsters. But, you know, this looks like a tenderloin. That's pretty good. Or that is a wicked, good-looking veggie burger. But if you show up late, you know you're getting fried chicken fingers and whatever crap is left there in the kale, for God's sake.

That is not that different. So when all this food is made in the surface waters and it sinks down, by the time it gets down 1,000 or 2,000 meters or deeper, a lot of the good stuff's gone. That's where whales get interesting. That's like you being at the end of the buffet line and someone's showing up and putting a smorgasbord, like a whole turkey. A seafood tower.

A seafood tower. Let's stick with the ocean thing. So at the last minute, someone's like, shows up with this and you're like, what the heck? This is my day. These whale falls and big falls are giant influxes of food to the deep sea. And what's super cool folks,

go check these videos out. But as soon as they hit ground, all sorts of critters come out of the darkness and walk their way to there and just tear it apart. Giant isopods, roly-pollies like the size of a person's head. Hagfish seemingly come out of nowhere. And they chomp on this, not just for a day, but for decades. Crazy. Oh, so the microbes that are throughout the deep sea, that's their bread and butter.

Yep. Right? Yep. And so dumping more things into the bottom, yeah, you don't know who's going to eat it, what they're going to pump out. Yeah. But how, when it comes to microbes, are we talking microbial plants? Are we talking archaea?

Are we talking fungi? Are we talking parasites? Are they in different phyla? Yeah. So there's really three major groups of organisms on Earth. There's a group called the archaea. And they're microbes in that they're microscores. in that they're microscopic, right?

But they may be our ancestors. Then there's a group of microbes called the bacteria, and we're familiar with the word bacteria, that often gets bantied around to represent all microbes. And then there's a third group called the eukaria, and those are cells that have a nucleus and some other particular features in their lipids, like they're these biochemical and structural diagnostics

that separate archaea, bacteria, and eukary. So far so good? We are a tiny, tiny, tiny little branch on this massive eukarya tree because there's a bunch of eukarya that are also microscopic and single cells. And we barely know a bunch about them too. So all of those are alive. All of those are living things. The way they eke out a living is different.

And this is a great point to sum up simply. But like, we animals are super cool because we've got all sorts of complicated tissues and organs and we can build structures and feet and tusks and hair and ears and all the stuff. But from an energy harnessing point of view, like metabolically, we're all pretty boring. So you eat stuff and you breathe oxygen. That's what a goldfish does. It's what Megapena does. It's what giant squid and whales do.

Fine. I get it. It's useful. It yields a lot of energy and you can build cool stuff like fingers. The bacteria and archaea are less structurally complicated. I don't call them primitive. That's nonsense. But they're less structurally complicated.

They don't have all these widgets that we do, but they're metabolic capacity, mind-blowing. When you have microbes that can make a living off of eating radioactive materials, I mean, come on. But when you're studying these microbes, how big are they? How do you find them? Right. I love that question. And I'm going to tell you a couple of things about microbes. So one, when we talk about microbes, we're usually talking about a,

a single-celled organism that is in the micron-ish range. So some are a little bit smaller, some are a little bit bigger, you know, one micron, five microns, 10 microns. So it's one-fortieth the size of a speck of dust. The average human hair is about 70 microns wide. Again, microbes can be one micron. Itty, it a bit, it-a-dibitty. So they're way smaller than the width of a human hair.

Statement one. Statement two is sometimes they hang out together, especially on the seafloor, and they form these communities that are really visible to the eye. And my favorite ones are called microbial mats, especially when they're in places like deep sea hydrothermal vents or natural gas seeps like a methane seep. these microbes form something that looks exactly like a 1970s shag carpet. It's yellow. I am not joking. Of course I look this up and I can verify it's groovy as hell. It's the color of one of those kind of golden mustard velour armchairs that your grandfather had in college that smells bad.

Or from afar, you might mistake it for a submerged aggregation of pollen, that yellow smear of life in the dark. And what happens is these microbes, they'll eat a sulfurous compound. They actually don't eat it as much as they breathe it. But it's one way they harness energy. And what they produce from that is sulfur. And the sulfur is sometimes trapped inside their cells or outside their cells.

It gives it a yellow color. But it is straight out of the 70s. And it is very, very fun. So they can form structures that are big, Allie. And sometimes they can even deposit minerals. and they formed these chimney-like things, we discovered a bunch of them off of Los Angeles in an unexpected place in 2018.

A whole bunch of these chimneys. These are not hydrothermal vent chimneys that are grown by the metal dust that comes out of a vent. These are chimneys that were grown by microbes. So they're really cool. They can do amazing things, and they can cooperate despite being single cells. How are they communicating?

Some colleagues of mine have done exceptional work, on studying how microbes decide when to act together towards a common goal. It's something called quorum sensing. Now, we think about a quorum, like when we take a vote, right? Do we have enough people here for a vote? Do we have a quorum? Amongst bacteria and other microorganisms, sometimes they decide to only do something when there's enough of them.

And let me give you a super cool example. Please do. In many parts of the world, including San Diego, California, There are microscopic algae. So there are cells a lot more like yours and mine. They have a nucleus and all that. When they grow in the ocean, they can produce biluminescent light,

and they're amazing. And sometimes they bloom, and they just produce all of just this incredible electric blue light show. There are also bacteria in the ocean that can do that, but they don't do it until they reach a high enough density. And only when they do that, do they chemically communicate with one another? And then they're like, okay, turn on the bilominessence.

Ah, what? Super cool. Yeah. So microbes talk to each other through chemical language. You know, we humans, like we people. I love how I call us we humans. We humans. We talk about things like pheromones, like, oh, if you dab this on you, you know,

all sorts of manner of people will be attracted to you. Well, because we know smell is really potent and smell is a form of chemical communication. And that's how microbes largely communicate. They don't have eyes because they don't have tissues like a single cell. So it's chemical chatter. How are they surviving underneath all of that pressure? If they don't have, say, a cell wall like an algae mite, what structure allows them to do that? There are many animals and many microbes that do perfectly fine in the deep sea.

We even find animals and microbes in the deepest part of our ocean. How? Great question. Life finds a way. It finds a way. I'll channel my inner Goldblum. Life finds a way. But the deal is when we think about what goes into a living organism like ourselves, we are made of water, right, primarily.

We are made of proteins and fats and other tissues, and then we have air spaces. When we go for scuba dive, alley, we can only go so far before. or we get crushed because those air spaces cannot stand up to the pressure. But animals in the deep sea and microbes don't have air spaces. Oh. Right. That's the first trick they have to pull off. Let me tell you about a fun thing I love to do.

On the Alvin submarine, we will take styrofoam cups down. A little eco-unfriendly, where we try not to lose them. You'll take a styrofoam cup down and put it outside your viewport. And as you go deeper and deeper, the styrofoam cup crushes, squeezes all the air out of it. So now your 8 or 12 ounce cup is like a shot glass. It's fun, Allie. Does it ever pop back up at the top?

Nope. Nope, it's shrunk and that's it. But check this out. So the styrofoam cup, because the air is compressible, gets squeezed into a shot glass. But I have tied water balloons to the Alvin submersible, and nothing happens because it's full of water. And water is not very compressible.

So it changes by like a percent in volume. So think of it this way. The creatures of the deep don't have air spaces. They're primarily water. And then the third trick is they have to modify their proteins and enzymes and fats just a little bit to deal with the pressure and the cold. That's the secret to dealing with the pressure and the cold temperatures in the deep ocean. How cold are we talking? Just above freezing in many cases.

So kind of like your refrigerator. You know, if you've walked into a walk-in cold room, you know, you know. you know at a restaurant if you ever worked as a restaurant, or if I did and you walk it and you pull the stuff out, yeah, that's what it's like. And so if you stay in there for a good 20 minutes, you realize, wow, this is cold. So that's the typical bottom of the ocean. There is no frozen ice at the bottom of the sea. People sometimes think that's the case, but ice floats, right?

So what you find at the bottom of the ocean is the coldest water can get before it freezes and becomes buoyant. It's like when you get an iced tea and there's not enough ice. floating on the top and you're like, I need this to hit the bottom of the glass. Absolutely. And when these microbes are making energy to survive, are they dissipating that as heat? Are they dissipating that as chemicals? Like, what is their metabolism like? Yeah, this is really at the heart of what my lab does for a lot of things.

We want to understand how they harness energy. So first, just as a reminder to all of us, like energy is not destroyed or created, right? So energy is energy. And what all living things do is they have to figure out how to tap into energy in some way, shape, or form. All the photosynthetic creatures we talked about the algae and the plants, they have got special molecules that, when hit by sunlight, harness the energy from that sunlight and do something like split water in that specific case, right? And we won't go into all of that, but it's like once you start harnessing sunlight, just, just like a solar cell on your house, you are moving electrons around, even in a living cell.

Think of it as making electricity to do work in a cell. If you are still haunted by memorizing a Krebs cycle flow chart, you may be seeing your life flash before your eyes right now. So who figured out, by the way, that vortex of arrows and chemistry that you probably tried in vain to memorize? It was one Sir Hans Adolf Krebs. He was a German biochemist. He was pals with Einstein, casual.

And his work in biochemistry, it landed him just international acclaim as a youth. Later, he got a Nobel Prize. But in between those accomplishments, he was dismissed from a really promising position because he was Jewish. And the Nazi party forbade non-Aryans and non-Nazis from working professionally. So he fled to Cambridge. He lived a successful life. His name is forever etched in the panic cramming of biology students. in perpetuity. That's sort of what's happening with plants. Microbes harness energy from chemical

reactions. And the one that I think is easiest to relate to is microbes that harness energy from methane. Really? Absolutely. Many of us have natural gas stoves or you've been around a natural gas stove and a lot of that is methane, sometimes things like propane, right? But the ocean has a lot of methane, a lot of it, believe it or not. In fact, the deep seas the world, world's largest methane reservoir. Now, microbes, there are microbes that have the enzymes where they can take methane and oxygen, just like you and me do, to cook our meals. But they harness energy from that reaction.

They don't light little fires, but they use enzymes to catalyze that reaction. So they can get energy out of combining methane and oxygen and giving off carbon dioxide, just like you and me. And that's one really clear way of thinking about how microbes can get energy off of chemicals. I mean, not smart question, but when you're combining those molecules, then what are the results of that? What is it giving off? Yeah, it's a great question. Is it? I don't know if that's very stupid. No, no. Well, I mean, given that's what my whole lab does for living, I mean, maybe. Maybe we're all like, oh, that's a silly question. But I think that

It's an important question because in order for us to understand how organisms make a living and to understand how they respond to a changing world, natural changes over evolutionary time, human cause changes. We have to start by understanding what do they eat? What do they give off? So let's stick with the methane one. So when you and I turn on a natural gas stove and we ignite it, that methane gives off carbon dioxide, and give off water vapor.

Like there's all sorts, depending on what we're burning, you give off compounds like that. And that's very, very common for a lot of these organisms. So if something harnesses energy from hydrogen and oxygen, it gives off water. Things like methane and oxygen give off carbon dioxide, right? There are plenty of microbes that make a living just like you and I do. They just eat dead stuff or live stuff, right? They're not that different.

So we call those heterotrophes. That's the fancy science word for it. Some of my favorite microbes, though, are the ones. ones that actually breathe rocks. What? Now, this is bananas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's totally bananas.

So in the ocean, when you get to the sediments and you go a little bit deeper, like the oxygen goes to zero. Okay. And it's because the microbes up above you have eaten all the organic matter they can and used all the oxygen they can. So below the deep sea mud, it's like, hey, we are 86 on oxygen. anything else on the menu that you want. But microbes don't care. They do not care, buddy. Microbes, if there's a microbe that can find a way to make a living off of two chemicals,

it's going to do it, whether there's oxygen or not. At some of those depths, Alley, is rust, rust, literally like iron oxides. Yeah. And there are microbes that, just like you and me, they eat organic matter, right? So they'll eat fish poo or, you know, they're eating organic stuff. They're eating the leftover remains of other animals or things like that. But they don't have any oxygen. So we, humans, we need oxygen so that we can take the food and kind of basically digest it and move the electrons, quite literally, from that food, through a bunch of biochemical pathways to do work.

And then oxygen is waiting there at the end to grab that electron. That's how we work in a nutshell. But because all the microbes in the upper ocean have used up the oxygen. These microbes don't have oxygen. So what they do is they hunker up to a piece of rust, and they have figured out how to take that electron and dump it on that rust. No. Yeah.

The fancy science name is extracellular electron transfer. What? Think of it this way, Ali. So you go and you have a veggie burger. Uh-huh. And for whatever reason, there's like no oxygen around, but you're like, no problem. I can do EET, and you press yourself up to a rusty wall, and you're fine. How many millions and millions of years does it take to evolve that?

Or were they doing that before we were even a glimmer in a silicant's eye? Yeah, yeah. No, they were probably doing that long before there was anything that even looked like us. And in fact, a former student in this lab named Izzy Baker, is now a professor at University of North Carolina. And my colleague, Jeff Grolnick, who's at University of Minnesota, we worked with the Grolnik lab and members of his lab on actually getting to this question, like, how far back does it go? How widespread is this ability? And it turns out that there's

a surprisingly large number of different kinds of microbes that can do this. Why? Well, it's because there's still a lot of space on today's Earth where there isn't oxygen, but there's metal oxides or mineral oxides, and these microbes can breathe those. And there was, certainly a time in Earth's past where there were microbes and no oxygen. You know, did you ever in your educational process or your youth or at any point, did you picture yourself going down to the bottom of the ocean floor in an elven in, I don't know if there are more than one. Is there just one alvin? There can be only one. There can be only one. So once again, we did an episode on deep

sea roundworms called bentopelagic neematology with Dr. Hollybick. And in it, we discussed the submersible Alvin. And just a side note, I know you're wondering. So a submarine can power itself to come back and forth from port, but a submersible has more limited power and it's dropped from another vessel. So anyway, Alvin, a submersible. I looked up some stats and this deep C submersible has completed more than 5,000 dives since the mid-1960s. No deaths, but if you get in a car and go buy some granola, you have a one in 10 million chance of meeting the Reaper, which is not zero. So less dangerous than buying granola. Also, how many bones are we talking to board Alvin? Okay, well, between renting the mothership that it's attached to, it's like 45,000 a day, easy.

Also, why Alvin? What does Alvin stand for? I think it's like aquatic life-sum. supporting vessel investigating nautical exploration. So I looked it up because I knew it stood for something bonkers. But no, it's just named Alvin because a guy named Alan Vine convinced Wood's whole Oceanographic Institute to build it in the 60s. Thanks, Alan. Sadly, he ventured to the Great Beyond at the age of 79 in 1994, but not in a submersible. This man drafted up a sketch of a submersible that would go on to explore the most remote portions of the planet and would save untold number of lives in naval safety. Also, the Alvin recovered a hydrogen bomb. Someone accidentally dropped in the ocean. Oofs, and it was the first crude vehicle to send humans back to the side

of the Titanic. And Alan Vine explored the depths of the ocean, safely aboard his namesake, and then died boringly in old age. I think he had heart failure, leaving the world above and below the sea with a broken heart, but iconic memories. In Alvin, was that something that you pictured, or is this a total curveball that you didn't anticipate? Oh, man, when I went to college,

I pictured myself, you know, in a few years as a very rich ophthalmologist working in a fancy office building doing ice surgeries. That's... What? Yeah, no, I know. That's what I thought I wanted to do. I really did not like the pre-med courses because I kind of thought, well, this is boring.

It's like we're really only studying one animal. And that just didn't cut it for me. But I had this love of history. So I switched to being an Italian history major for a while. I went to UCLA. Yeah. And UCSB. And UCSB.

That's right. Ditched pre-men and thought, I'm going to do this history thing. Loved it. I wouldn't say I was great at it, but I loved it. And then I took an oceanographer. class and was totally hooked. It's also true that I was a big fan of Star Trek and especially the next generation. And that idea of exploration really rang a bell.

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyagers of the Starship Enterprise. It's continuing mission to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. to boldly go where no one has gone before. And so when I told my parents, I wanted to do ocean science, and I was surprised by this, they kind of laughed and they said, well, we're not.

You spent your whole childhood drawing killer whales and squids and boats. Right. So, yeah, sometimes it takes a while to know ourselves, right? I was going to say, to be known as to be loved. They were like, we're not surprised. Exactly. Exactly. That's so sweet. I mean, being in Alvin and being on the enterprise, not that much different. I mean... No, not at all. Yeah. You're out there like Sir Patrick Stewart.

Yep. Just cruising. Yep. I mean, you mentioned that just studying one human as one species isn't as interesting, but also history. Is there something about studying all these different microbes and trying to figure out what their history is? does that sort of scratch and itch is the evolutionary biology of it? Yeah, it does. I mean, everyone I've met has something that gets them up in the morning, right? To me, it doesn't even matter what it is. I just, I love that about we humans.

Like, we're really drawn to something. And when we're not, really, it's a real downer. And we have to sometimes work to refine that, to rediscover it. Yeah. For me, the idea of helping better understand how this world works appeals to a very big part of myself. That's an engineer at heart. And diving in Alvin, as you say, it's like being on the enterprise, except, of course, it's real, right? Yeah.

And being able to do this work and go down and see, from my own eyes, the relationship between the animals and the rocks upon which they live. or the very nature of the sediment and to do the chemical analyses that help us understand who lives where and why. That is a detective story, and it's a story about Earth's past, which really is also a story about our own past. And so I love looking for those connections

that we see all around us, and sometimes we don't see. That's what really drives me in terms of trying to play a role in this, really human desire to understand our place in this whole mess. Yeah. I feel like every scientist is hoping to change the world for the better.

And actually, on that note, we donate to a charity of your choice. But can I ask you questions from listeners? Yeah. And of course, you know this, but before we do, we like to sink some cash toward a more than worthy cause. And this week, Peter chose the National Immigration Law Center, which was established in 1979, it works at the intersection of immigrant, economic, and racial justice. They do that through impact litigation, policy, advocacy, and narrative and culture change.

You can learn more about them at the National Immigration Law Center, N ILC.org, is their website. So we'll donate in his honor, and thank you to sponsors of the show for making that possible every week. Okay, so thank you to patrons who support the show for a dollar or more a month at patreon. com sociologies and submit some stellar questions ahead of time. This one was on the minds of Adi Capello, Danielle Zonis, Bug at a Rug, and Bug asked about some of the crazy ways critters can make energy without the sun. And, okay, Phil Zaljeck wants to know. Hey, I would really like to know how different species can exist with zero light. Thank you. That's a great question. So at the end of the day, living things,

don't need light. They don't. Our planet is based on really the work that plants do to harness energy from the sun. So going back to energy, to be a living creature, you need to constantly fill your fuel tank, period. There is no perpetual motion pete or perpetual motion alley. Like it does not exist. So how do you fill your fuel tank? On this planet, we depend on that star that we orbit the sun, right? Part of our research, though, considers the possibility that on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, in total darkness,

that there could well be microbes living off the same kinds of chemicals that we know they live off here. If you eat hydrogen, I keep using heat, but if you use hydrogen for your fuel, you know, you can find something like oxygen to give its electrons to,

you can make a living. Let me put it this way. If we imagine what life might look like on a moon of Jupiter or Saturn, one very, very possible way of making a living as a microbe is to combine hydrogen gas with carbon dioxide, which we both know are in relative abundance in our solar system. So deep sea microbes are kind of a proof of concept, opening up new ways of considering life in the rest of the universe. These are not hard to find. There are microbes on Earth that take hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and they give off methane. That's their fart. Like, they fart off methane.

That's what they do. So to answer Phil's question, there are plenty of ways microbes, we know how microbes can make a living in total darkness. Right. And part of what we try to do is understand them on Earth and then ask, where else might they be found in our solar system? So lands unexplored distant places in the vast darkness of space. but we have food at home. Great question from Arlo Wagoner, wanted to know, as well as Earl of Grahamelkin, Don Smallcheck, Benevoleneish, Lynn, Matt Sicado, Ali Betts, wants to know, Arlo asked a silly question, but what's the process for collecting samples of microbes and bacteria in the deep sea? I'm curious. And Benevolenish wanted to know how long do creatures live that we bring to the surface? And also, Lynn is an aspiring clinical microbiologist. and says, I imagine it's super difficult to culture these microbes.

And how are you doing that? And so how are you getting them? Are you putting them in little tiny vials? And do you have to worry about them dying on the ride up? Yeah, a huge shout out to your listeners there. Great questions. All right. So I heard three things.

How do we get them? How do we keep them alive? And then what are some of the methods we use to study them in the lab? So first, how do we get them? Sometimes it's as simple as going. down with the Alvin submersible or a robotic submersible, and we use those robots or Alvin to go down and we take a scoop of mud. We call it sediment. That's actually a more accurate description, right? But we have these tubes, these plastic tubes, we call push cores, and you shove this

plastic tube in the sediment, and you close off the top, just like, you know, how you can put a straw in a glass of lemonade, put your thumb over the top, and bring up a little lemonade. Similar idea and we bring with us some sediment and we put it on the submarine or the remotely operated vehicle and we bring it to the surface. What we often do in my lab is we immediately have some apparatus set up to keep them alive. One of our tools is a shipping container, just like you would see on a railroad car, that we have turned into a mobile high pressure laboratory. It's like our version of the space station. Oh my God. So every time we go to sea and we have a need to do this, we haul it over the research vessel, we bolted to the deck, and we set up all of our high

pressure aquaria. When a submarine comes up or the ROV comes up, we take the rocks or the sediments and we put them in the pressurized aquaria and we repressurize them. And we add certain kinds of food so we can add methane. I love the idea of like, we add some food. Yeah. For example, a deep sea fart. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Vodapit. Totally. And one of one of our favorites is hydrogen sulfide, this rotten egg. gas that's like, by the way, more poisonous than cyanide. So that's fun. Hey, if you like poisons, you'll love our old-timey toxicology episode with Deborah Blum. Cyanide and arsenic and chloroform. Oh, my. But a bunch of microbes love sulfide. So we figure out and have built this really cool, really

robust system that lets us provide the fuel to these microbes and the food. And we do it in such a way that we can track, often track anyway, who's doing what, even in a mixed community. So we'll take sediment or rocks. And I'm really interested in saying, look, I don't want to separate them from one another because personally I believe that's kind of problematic. I want to study them as a community. And I want to see if I give them methane and I give them hydrogen, who's making the most number of cells? And then in turn, who eats those cells? It's really understanding the individuals and their relationships to one another. Which makes sense because it seems like if you tried to separate them, that would be as different as trying to separate birds from trees and squirrels who bury acorns, correct?

Super well said. Super well said. And your listener, though, who's aspiring to be a medical microbiologist, for medical research, we often do separate them because that lets us actually study some parts of their fundamental characteristics that's harder to do in a mix. There isn't one better than the other, but the questions you can answer are different. So you nailed it, Ali. You know, if you really want to understand the natural history of a bird, taking it and putting it in a bird cage isn't useful. Yeah. Well, you mentioned also with medicines, and I wouldn't have even thought of this, but Sassy Shork, Don Smolchuk, Chelsea, and her dog Charlie, Allison, wanted to know, the Sassy Sharks said, is it worth looking down there for medicines? Don said, has there been any

research with antibiotic resistance in these microbes. In terms of industry, and I'm sure that, you know, I know funding is always one of the worst parts about trying to continue research. Is industry looking toward solutions for us up here with what's going on down there? Yeah. So there are colleagues of mine who are looking into the deep sea for inspiration as to how to think about microbial warfare. Wow. Antibiotics is literally that, right? We are trying to come up with tools that help the few microbes that make us sick, right,

to combat those. And microbes have been sort of wrestling with one another for as long as there have been microbes. And so, yes, there absolutely is ongoing research in that area. One of the things I think is important to emphasize, though, is, and this is, and this is a little bit of a societal comment is that sometimes our sort of medical mega industry favors something that's going to be most profitable. And right now, there isn't as much emphasis on antibiotics as there has been, or as, in my opinion, there could or should be. So, yes,

there are a lot of candidates that have come from studies in the ocean and the deep sea. But getting those to trial is a really heavy lift. Is this true, though? Is there any evidence? that deep sea microbes could really be of any use. So I went searching for some proof. And I found a 2018 paper in the journal Marine Drugs. It was called antibiotics from deep sea microorganisms, current discoveries and perspectives. And it explained that the isolation of microorganisms from these previously unexplored habitats may lead to the discovery of structures with antibiotic activity. Deep sea microorganisms have the potential to produce novel secondary metabolites. with some potent biological activities.

Holy smokes. Okay, but that was eight years old. Wait, okay. There's a 2024 Frontiers article. Promising antibiotic candidates discovered in microbes deep in the Arctic Sea, and it notes that researchers from Finland and Norway, they looked at compounds of actinobacteria, living inside invertebrates in the Arctic Sea.

They found two interesting compounds with strong antiviral and antibacterial effects against E. coli, demonstrating the best. potential of poking around these new unexplored habitats for some antibacterial drugs. They say to solve the current global antibiotics crisis. I didn't realize it was a crisis yet, but I don't like the sound of that. I feel like we kind of are full up of crises, but I'm glad that some people are working on it, including Peter. Also, there was a 2024 marine drugs paper, deep sea ecosystems as an unexpected source of antibiotic resistant genes. And it says that that unique microbial life in deep sea ecosystems, especially in trench waters, could be a valuable source of new

antibiotics and resistance discovery. So we got some problems, but we got deep sea microbes and very smart people working on it. If you are a powerful person or a billionaire, please fund this science because you could have festering wounds or horrible E. coli diarrhea that depends on it. Also, everyone else on the planet would be like, that's so clutch. Thank you. So the punchline is, We as scientists do what I call foundational science. We're doing the kind of basic research that helps us understand just how things work. Then in an ideal world, someone picks it up and says,

how do I translate this into an application? And that part right now isn't going as quickly as it could. But the basic research is still solidly underway, and there's a lot we have to learn about how microbes deal with other microbes. I feel like that research will not amp up until some shit hits a fan, And then everyone says, why didn't we pay more attention to this in the past? Yeah, we're really good at that. Like, that's kind of our jam, right?

A lot of people had a question. You might get a lot. Camille Casia Swarred, Happy Day Painting, Sam the Science Teacher, McKenzie King, Cam K, Louis H. Chuck Merriam. Rebecca Morrison and Jen Squirrel Alvarez want to know about aliens. And Camille asked, how good learning about deep sea organisms teach us about potential life other planets? Jen just wants to know cephalopods are aliens, right?

I mean, come on. They're so magical confirm or deny. But things in the deep sea and alien life, I think a lot of people probably want to know, is them aliens down there? But it's more teaching us about what could exist elsewhere. Yeah? Yeah.

So there is a tiny, tiny, impish part of me that wants to drop a total bomb here, kind of like HG Wells, right? And where it was like, oh, my God, the cephalopods, I am totally sure they're aliens. But there's a nymph of me that's like, I don't think that's a good idea. It's a weird enough world. But let me speak to those fantastic questions. So when I started as a graduate student, I really wanted to do this because I wanted to study these animals and microbes that live at hydrothermal vents and do some really weird crap. There's a tubeworm, my favorite tube worm that I did my PhD work on. It's called Riftia. Here's Riftia in a nutshell. It's a worm like any other worm. And as a warm baby,

like any other warm baby, it swims through the water and eat stuff. And somewhere along that journey, it finds a microbe that it decides as its buddy. And then it seals itself up. And either it finds this micro by eating it or the microbe hits its skin. But somehow they're like, oh, hey, hey partner and then this little worm transforms into a giant four-foot-long worm that has no mouth no gut no stomach no digestive track no anus no but nothing like that but it grows 10 billion to a hundred billion of this specific kind of microbe inside its body like some big old weird yogurt culture oh and it keeps those microbes alive i know i know right totally weird it still weirds me out it keeps those microbes alive by sucking up hydrogen sulfide that rotten egg smell that i mentioned

that's also more toxic than cyanide, sucks it up out of the hydrothermal vent hot spring water, which is full of it, takes it to those microbes, and that's their fuel. And the microbes use that and oxygen from the cold surrounding water. And the kick in the head is those microbes do exactly what plants do.

They turn carbon dioxide into sugars. And they feed themselves and they feed this worm. Like, that's weird. That's some weird crap. That's nuts, like a goger. Totally. Like the biggest. tube of gogurt you've ever seen living off of poison. That's so hard. That is also going in my

deep-sea biology slides, copyright alley. Totally, totally like this creepy gogert. And yeah, I mean, this worm is bizarre. So, so the fact is it's not an alien. But why don't we call it kind of an alien-like morphology or an alien-like weird way of being? Because it's so different than what we do. Just imagine, you know, born. And as an infant, your mom's breastfeeding you and everything's fine. And then one day, suddenly you encounter your symbiont and mom's like, oh, my little baby's growing up. And then your mouth seals up and your buttle seals up. And now you start culturing a bunch of bugs in you. And your mom has to soak you in a sulfide solution every now and that. I mean, this is crazy stuff. Oh, that's beautiful. That's so beautiful that that exists. And I'm just up here worried about

paying taxes. And that's going on down there. Well, actually, on that note, Jen O wanted to know, have hydrothermal vents and tube worms become the dinosaurs of deep sea biology? Essentially, given how little of the seafloor we've explored, do you expect mostly variations of organisms we already know, or entirely new kinds of biological communities we haven't even imagined yet? Carly Delson, Thoroporous Jess, Nikki G, Mimi, Ziz, Aaron Gunderson, wandering Wyatt, red-headed scientist, and first-time question-askers Will McClure, Lissy. and Riley Mac, as well as Sustainable Sirenian, who asked, could you talk about the extremophiles that live around hydrothermal vents and chemosynthesis? And Isabel Fitzpatrick asked, what's up with the primordial soup and deep sea vents? I've heard theories that that's where life started. Is that true? And that is a million billion trillion dollar question. There was a 2021 article in the

journal Science Advances titled Cellular Remains in a 3.42 billion-year-old sub-floor hydrothermal environment, and it explains that subsurface habitats on Earth likely provided one of Earth's earliest microbial habitats. And the researchers go on to describe the discovery of this exceptionally well-preserved three-plus billion-year-old set of micro fossils from this hydrothermal area off of South Africa. But before you start getting super stoked and spreading rumors like a chatbot, the paper cautioned that the site of life's emergence continues. to be debated. I bet people get wild. I bet people at conferences get drunk and are shouting about it in hotel lobbies. Look, the deep sea is so big. And my colleague Katie Crop Bell, she and members of

Ocean Discovery League, her not-for-profit, published a beautiful paper in which they just decided to go through and say, let's look at all the dive videos and dive tracks from 80 years of ocean exploration. and let's just see how much we've seen. And it's just a sliver, a sliver of a fraction of a percent. Like seen with our own eyes. So we're going to find more biodiversity. So there'll be more rifty at two-worm cousins. We'll find at other vents, pretty sure.

Even when we go to the same places we've studied for, you know, 35, 40 years, we still find new species. I fully expect us to find animals making a living in a way that we weren't really, you know, sure was possible before. You know, some of them are parasites and they do weird things, climbing onto other animals. But you know what's really the Wild Wild West is microbes. Because we know that there are so many different kinds of microbes. I mean, the whole concept of species doesn't even hold the microbes for a bunch of reasons.

But let's just pretend we're talking billions of species of microbes. But we know that of those billions, something like 1,500 make people sick. That's it. and all the rest run the planet and keep this place healthy and working. They're undersung, really. Totally undersung. Totally undersung. And they can do things that we didn't think were possible.

Like it wasn't just 30 years ago or 40 years ago that everyone's like, yeah, there's no way microbes can make a living off of methane, the way I just shared it with you. Before that, people had no idea that there are microbes that could live in the walls of nuclear power plants because they have figured out how to avoid radiation damage because they have lots of copies of their genome. And what kills a lot of organisms is the radiation thrashes the DNA and now you can't make a good copy of yourself because your blueprints effed up. But if you have 12 copies of your blueprint and you superimpose them, you're like,

okay, that's broken, that's broken, that's broken, here's a brand new one that works. Crazy stuff. Oh, my God. Yeah. Just redundancies on redundancies as insurance. Well, you know, you mentioned something about how little has been exploring. which gives me like the best kind of vertigo. But the sassy shore cut, great questions this episode, but said they had a poster when they

were young that said only one person had ever gone to the halal zone. Halal zone. How come? What is that zone? And is that true? Right. So the deepest, deepest part of the oceans are we call them the Hidal zone. Dang.

Auto, correct? And it was back in the 1960s that two. men went in a submersible to the Hidal zone. And on one dive, they went to the deepest part of the Challenger Deep, and that was it. Okay, so the Challenger Deep. It's deeper than Everest. It's the deepest known point on our planet. It's in the middle of the Pacific, just a relative stones throw above the Mariana Islands. And on the deep southern tip of this 1,500 mile or 2,500 kilometer long Mariana Trench is the chasm Challenger Deep. It was named after a mid-1800s British Royal Navy vessel that first found it.

But in 1960, the first vehicle traveled down there. And as of now, only 27 Earthling humans have made it to the Challenger Deep. That's only like twice the number of people that have made it to the moon. And one of them, Hollywood filmmaker, Jimmy Cameron, another is a famed hydranaut. named Jacques Picard. And yes, I looked it up, and Star Trek the next generation's captain, Jean-Luc Picard, is named for him. I was thrilled to find on the list of those 27 people. Absent from it was Jeff Bezos. And remember, if the ocean waters were a parfait, the top is the epipelagic, then the mesopalgic, bathypolgic, abyssal zone, and then at the bottom of the

cup is the Hidal zone. It's below the abyss. Wow, that's really deep. That was it until about, maybe it was a 2011 or so, where James Cameron went back by himself in his own submersible. But think about that. We're talking something like just shy of 50 years where we went to the bottom of the ocean, and then that was it, to the deepest point.

So here's the thing about the Hidal zone that I think we should all sort of think about is when you go to this deepest point in the ocean and you've got these immense pressures and ice cold temperatures, And there's one other big stressor, Ali, and that's the food is so little. How is it that creatures stay alive on so little food? And that is a fundamentally important question.

And so we study microbes in the Hedal zones. We study microbes that live deep, deep underneath the ocean crust because they eke out a living on almost nothing. And that's not a perpetual motion machine, but it's damn efficient. And trying to understand that tells us what is the actual limits of life. how much energy do you need to harness? And that changes the way we think about where they might be found. And I understand that James Cameron has done a lot of pioneering in terms of vessels

and just brought a lot of attention to the need to explore these areas. Allie belts wanted to know, and I know this is going to be a tough question, but what's the cost of submersibles for your work? And also, do you worry about dangers like the Ocean Gate, collapsed submersibles as these areas try to become more accessible. I know Alvin is like gold standard, gold standard, but as this becomes this sort of frontier that people become more interested in, especially with mining, are you ever worried about safety being compromised?

I love that question. And that's actually easy to answer because the bottom line is this. I have zero concerns about diving in Alvin. zero concerns about diving and submersibles that are designed like Alvin, and I have zero concerns about any submarine operator that complies to best practices. Alvin is a workhorse. I mean, look, look at it this way. Alvin's a sphere, and that sphere is made of metal, and it is, there is a certain truth in saying that the more times it goes down and the more it gets squeezed, the harder that metal becomes. Spheres do really well under pressure. So I'm not worried about an event similar to the

a terrible tragedy we saw with Ocean Gate because that happened because someone decided to not take the advice of others. And sadly, Ali, we knew that carbon fiber did not work. We have known that for 25 years. Yeah. So not a concern. Submersibles, like Alvin, usually cost tens of millions of dollars. Call it 40 to 45, right? Not cheap, but at the same time, look, just to be clear, the Alvin submersible costs less than the cost of a missile, like the part that blows up. So put it in perspective, right? Yeah. The second thing is that the robot subs that we use cost about a tenth of that.

They cost about $5 million. And that's a good deal. Yeah. And I think most people are leaning on the robot subs more and more now. The bottom line is I do want to see submersible stick around because the value to science is insane. But robot subs are a great place to go when you've been there before and you've seen it with your own eyes and you just have some work to do. Yeah. And it's interesting too that the structure of a sphere, that's based in science and based in biology and based in what we know can

handle pressure and physics. And so a lot of different sciences have to collaborate and listen to each other. But, you know, we did bring up mining and Earl of Chiawewee, Camke, Benny Olick, Julio Rulishe, we've got so many listeners on the show of this. Ziz, Natalie. Benny wanted to know how will deep sea mining impact the ecosystem of the deep sea and said, it's so stupid. They're even trying to do this as a comment, which may or may not. Maybe mining is smart.

But what's happening with mining down there? Yeah. You know, I think the biggest problem with the idea of deep sea mining is that we're really going into this a bit blind. Like we just, come on, folks, we really don't. No one has done an experiment of this magnitude before. So we're a bit blind in that regard. But the other thing I want us to consider is that the biggest problem in deep sea mining is that I don't trust us.

Yeah. We, humans, we really suck at working together towards a common shared goal. You know, we have examples of people introducing animals to Australia that are now overrunning an entire continent because we brought it one animal to solve a problem and it created another problem. Mike, come on. Cantoads. Yeah, exactly, cane toads. I am not a pessimist. I very much lean towards being an idealist and a realist. But the bottom line is I worry about deep sea mining because I just don't think the benefits outweigh the cost. Right. I really don't. Yeah. I mean, it's so tough to see a slow motion car crash day after day after day. Yeah. But something that I'm sure that you want to get on a soapbox about is Azile Hull and Strawberry Mom both want to know.

Azil asked, what are the odds that there's an entire civilization down there like Atlantis? Is this finally the platform you've been waiting for to announce that Atlantis is real? Again, the very impish part of myself is like, let's do it. Let's burn all science down. I mean, we're on that path anyway. What the hell? Sure. Why not?

Look, what is fun to riff off that theme, though, is that I had the privilege of being on a TV program. I probably won't say what it is for all the obvious reasons. But the question this TV program was asking was, why are there so many flood stories? Oh. So I have had the privilege also of reading a lot of history. And there's flood stories in so many civilizations. I mean, not just Greece and Rome and the Middle East, but in China. China and around the end of Philippines, since we're talking about the ocean, entire hydrothermal

vent fields are wiped clean during an eruption. We've seen it happen. We have seen it happen. I believe that humankind has had entire communities or societies or civilizations seriously damaged, if not lost by big earthquakes or tsunamis or the like. And so if the question is, Is there a city somewhere that was maybe on a volcanically active island that sank to the seafloor? Sure. I have no problem with that. And I can imagine that could be how many of these kinds of stories kind of come to the fore about Atlantis and the like. So there may be a kernel of truth to civilizations being lost beneath the sea. You ever see a kraken? As a great question. I have seen a lot of squid in my life in terms of the two species

that are really big and are in the deep sea, I have not yet had that privilege. But squid, crazy cool, crazy weird. And if there are aliens among us, that's where my money is. Whoever brought that up before, Cephalopods, it's where my money is.

What about Camille wants to know? Last listener question. Spookiest thing you've ever seen. You ever seen anything spooky down there? Hey, you've creep you out. Yeah, I saw a very big shark that bumped into us. Hello. And I want to be clear here that there is

absolutely no rational reason to be worried about that at all. It's not going to break the sub for crying out loud. No one was under threat. But we are so hardwired to have these reactions that I looked out this and I'm like, oh my God, I saw all these gills. It's freaked me out, Allie. And then literally it took me about 10 seconds to say, dude, pull yourself together, man. This is super cool. That is, that's definitely one of the spookiest things. And now I'm going to be a little darker and say that probably the worst thing I've seen is a lot of pollution in places where I never thought I'd see it. Right.

That was a bummer. Right. I'm sure that people think about there's probably dead bodies down there, but what we should be thinking about are the barrels of DDT that are buried off the coast of Catalina and things like that, right? That's it. You got it. Do deep sea microbiologists have any idea how much weird chits buried?

I mean, we know we have records of a lot of container. I forget how many, but it's like thousands fall off of ships every year. So that means there's thousands of containers on the seafloor with LCD TVs and toasters and mattresses. The barrels you mentioned are interesting because we don't actually know what's in some of them. And I have colleagues at UC Santa Barbara, Dave Valentine, and colleagues at Scripps who are studying these and they're trying to get to the bottom of what chemicals are in there. Get to the bottom.

We see evidence of microbes chomping on it. But nobody wants to go and poke one of these and cause a spill. So we really tiptoe around these. But there are places that are a mess alley. How messy? Well, a little fun dinner party fact is that for nearly 40 years, these big 1980s-era orange plastic telephones, shaped like Garfield, kept washing up on French beaches.

Was this like a paranormal occurrence? Were these things seeking lasagna and revenge for Mondays? Well, in 2019, the mystery finally cracked open. One man recalled seeing a wayward shipping container wedged in a sea cave. Could have told people earlier, but whatever. And then they descended into the site. Some scientists found a trove of Garfield phones in a shipping container, again, wedged in a sea cave. Did they just dredge them all up?

Sell them as artifacts of the Anthropocene? No, it's just, it's too hard to get out. So Garfield just still haunts the shores and bits and pieces, like a plastic cat siren. But do you want to hear something scary? Okay, great. So according to this 2025, Scripps Institution of Oceanography article titled, Decades Old Barrels of Industrial Waste, still impacting ocean floor off L.A. From the 1930s until the early 1970s, 14 deep water dump sites off the coast of Southern California

received refinery wastes, filter cakes and oil drilling wastes, chemical wastes, refuse and garbage, military explosives, and radioactive wastes. Wonderful. Oceanographers have found thousands of pieces of dangerous treasure, like a dumpside of military weapons. And yeah, just this unknown number of barrels containing the pesticide DDT and some battery acid, they think. But the good news is there could have been way more sunken barrels. But thankfully, people just raw-dogged the stuff straight into the ocean. But if that's too depressing, I do want you to know that scripts named their remote-operated vehicle sub-aschen.

So humans are not all bad. Some of them, though, real dicks. When I read about what was buried so close to Catalina and so close to L.A., I was shocked. I was like, y'all didn't go a little farther out. Like, you're literally vacationing on that island. Like, what? Yeah. You know, for all of humankind's amazing attributes, my God, we can be damn lazy.

I'm like, what could you just clean up after yourself? I yell at my kids about this. Why can't grown adults clean up after yourself? I know, especially when it comes to multi-generational barrels of poison. But what is the hardest part about studying this? Is it getting things up to the surface? Is it email? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

All of that's the good stuff. Look, I mean, I love what I do. And the risk of being immodest, our lab team is damn good at it. And many of my colleagues, so many scientists are exceptional. And we work really hard to do the science with the resources we have at hand.

The hardest part is convincing people that it matters. And there are many people who do everyone who listens to your show does. But I spend a lot of my time trying to go to Congress or to businesses and to say, look, I don't need to convince you that you need to devote your life to this. But in the same way that businesses, for example, respect meteorologists because they're like, oh, yeah, the weather that immediately affects me. It's so too for the ocean. Ali, the deep sea hydrothermal vents play a big role, for example, in pumping. iron into the ocean and that iron is necessary for little algae to grow and to feed fishes.

And those fishes can end up playing a big role in our own health and well-being and nutrition. I mean, my God, Ali, that's like a very short connection between us and deep sea hydrothermal fats. They're like the ocean's multivitamin. It matters. What happens everywhere in our biosphere matters. And if anyone's on an aquarium, you know that if one thing goes wrong in some corner of that place, the whole damn thing goes to hell.

Yeah. That's the hardest part, Ali. It's convincing people this matters. Everyone wants to go see a movie about alien life and wonders if there's UFOs. But meanwhile, learning about the deep sea can tell us so much about life on other planets and what living things are capable of. I think it's so fascinating. What about your favorite part?

What's the best part? Is it ducking into Alvin? Is it coming up with a tube full of mud or rather sediment? What's the part that's just the best? I have two absolute favorite things. So number one is the first day at sea and, well, I'm going to lump these together. When I haven't been to sea for a while and I step on the boat and we're underway, oh, man, oh, I love it. And then I get inside the Alvin's sub.

Ooh, beautiful. That's one. I'm going to bundle that as number one. The second is watching the team members, the undergraduates and the graduate students and the postdocs, experience this for the first time, and make a discovery of their own. I mean, Al, there's nothing more satisfying,

to me, nothing more satisfying, than knowing that you're a part of a team that will continue to make contributions to understanding our world. Like, my job is to help everyone in my lab become the best version of themselves. And I love seeing that. So those are my two favorite things, right? When people run with their own ideas and it's just a real joy to watch. It's just like brand new knowledge.

Like volcanic rock becomes new earth and it's just sort of this magma creating new knowledge. Totally. It's totally. And one quick comment on that, right? Like I picked up a rock from the seafloor one time with the Alvin sub because I said, oh, this was really shiny. Literally, I am not a geologist. I was like, here's a shiny thing.

It looks like obsidian, you know, volcanic glass. And, you know, I asked my colleague at Woods Hole, my friend named Dan Fernari, and he said, oh, that's really young, like maybe a year old. In fact, it's so young that it was still popping and had little gas inclusion, so it sounded like Rice Krispies. But think about that, Allie. I was holding a rock that was a year old. And anybody who goes to a volcano, you know, is holding a rock, this like really young

magma baby, you know? And what a crazy world we live in to be able to see the birth of the seafloor, animals that live in total darkness. It's amazing. It really makes you feel small in a good way. Whenever you dip into the ocean, since you're a micrologist, do you ever think about all the things that are living on you and crawling on you? I mean, I have really thick hair.

And when I go surfing, which is once every few years, I just think of how many things are alive in my hair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yes. And you know what? I think it's cool. So I have, first off, I think it's cool because I'm literally not alone. I am not making that up. There have been some times where I've had some really crappy days and I thought I've got to persevere for my kids, for my family, for the lab. And I'm like, oh, plus I got all these like microbes that are spending on me. So there's that. But you know, I think we were talking about just a second ago about, you know, feeling small. I get it. I also

think it kind of makes me feel a little bigger in that I don't think of myself as just an individual, like in those moments of clarity. I mean, I'm as human as the next person. So, man, you know, dealing with my ego, my insecurities and all that. But in those moments of clarity, I was like, wow, we are one big living biosphere with a bunch of individuals and we're also a colony. Like, I just have to acknowledge I can't wrap my head about how cool our world is. And that That's pretty awesome feeling. I love it. May we all be microbial mats in the world working together in tough circumstances.

You're here. Here, here. So ask delightful people, deep, deep, dark questions because they will likely shed some light on them. Thank you so, so much to Dr. Peter Gerges for being on ologies. You're a gem forged under oceanic pressure and earth is very lucky to have you. You can learn more about him in the show notes. such as visiting his Grigis Laboratory site and also checking on his papers on Google Scholar.

We'll also add a link to our website with all those studies we mentioned, pictures of the Krebs cycle and more. And if you're looking for shorter kid-safe episodes of Ologies, you can check out Smologis, which are in their very own feed, no swearing, G-rated, just type in S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S-M-O-E-S-M-O-G-E-S-M-O-G-E-S-M-E-S-M-E-S-M-E-S-M-E-S-M-W. Tell your friends who have kids or who don't like when we swear. We have Ologies merch at Ologiesmerch.com.

You can join our Patreon to support the show and leave your questions and hop on the discussion thread that we post each week where I like to weigh into. That's at Patreon.com slash ologies. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Allie Word on both. Ali has just one L. Aaron Talbert, admins, The Ologies podcast Facebook group, Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardweir does the website. Making sure the boats are on time is scheduling producer Noel Dilworth. Our very own Jean-Luc Picard is managing director Susan Hale.

And at the controls of our personal submersible, our editor Jake Chafee and lead editor, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn is the siren who crafted the theme music. And if you stick around to the very end. You know I may tell you a secret. This week, it's a good, positive one. So I've gone to 49 of the 50 United States. And this week, I'm checking off my 50th. West Virginia, I'm coming for you. I'm going to interview an expert about craw dads. And you listened this long. So I'm just going to tell you there might be a mothman episode for Spooktober coming up. West Virginia, hang on to your hats. Pretty stoked. All right, West Virginia. See you soon. Bye-bye. Pnecermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, lithology, nanotechnology, meteorology.

But I thought the old lady dropped him into the ocean in the air. Well, baby, I went down and got it for you.