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- Holiday tubeworms
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- Ari Daniel Shapiro
This piece is about Riftia tube worms, one of the first living creatures discovered on the deep ocean floor, which scientists had thought was barren. This month (December 2009) is the 30th anniversary of a cruise exploring the bottom of the ocean that initiated some of the early studies on Riftia. The cruise took place at the Rose Garden hydrothermal vent site near the Galapagos (now gone due to a lava flow, most likely). The piece also has a seasonal (winter holiday) peg.
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Piece Description
This piece is about Riftia tube worms, one of the first living creatures discovered on the deep ocean floor, which scientists had thought was barren. This month (December 2009) is the 30th anniversary of a cruise exploring the bottom of the ocean that initiated some of the early studies on Riftia. The cruise took place at the Rose Garden hydrothermal vent site near the Galapagos (now gone due to a lava flow, most likely). The piece also has a seasonal (winter holiday) peg.
Transcript
Ari: Thirty years ago this month (this week), scientists were just returning from an expedition to the very bottom of the ocean. To go that deep, Alvin comes in handy.
Cavanaugh: Yes, Alvin is, I always say it’s the submarine, not the chipmunk.
Ari: Colleen Cavanaugh is a biology professor at Harvard University, and has been in Alvin a few times.
Cavanaugh: It’s a so-called manned, which I call it a womanned submersible. It has a pilot and carries two scientific observers.
Ari: And it’s tiny. The space where you actually sit, there’s barely enough room to stretch your arms out to the sides. Tiny portholes let you look out. Usually, there’s not that much to see.
Cavanaugh: Most of the deep sea just looks like sediment or black rock, you know, very, very few organisms.
Ari: But the story’s different in places called hydrothermal vents. Basically, they’re hot springs on the oce...
Read the full transcript
Intro and Outro
INTRO:The season of giving and good will is upon us. But imagine giving a gift so fundamental to someone that their survival depended on it. And vice versa: your survival depended on their gift. In biology when the gift-givers are two different species, this is called symbiosis. It’s happening everywhere, all the time. In your garden, for example. For that matter, it’s happening inside your body. And, remarkably, in the deep sea. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro gives us this story.
OUTRO:Ari's story came to us from Atlantic Public Media, which produces the podcast of the Encyclopedia of Life.
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