![]() ![]() But it’s an apt name for her specimen, which rests as straight as a chopstick on top of the raised edges of a petri dish. Dykman works in the lab of the biologist Lauren Mullineaux, who has spent decades studying the hydrothermal-vent community where this zoarcid lived, ate, and died.įishsicle, Dykman assures me, is not a technical term, but one she picked up while feeding frozen fish to seagulls at a wildlife-rehabilitation center. It’s a baby zoarcid, as long as a ballpoint pen and frozen since around last Christmas, when Dykman visited Nine North in the submersible Alvin. She squeezes what looks like a tiny pink Otter Pop out of a Ziploc bag. “This is a fishsicle,” Dykman announces over a Zoom call in September from her dissection station in a laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. As one researcher told me, “It would be like looking for a microscopic needle in an infinity-sized haystack.”Īgainst these impossible odds, a graduate student named Lauren Dykman thinks she’s nearly figured it out. So it’s unsurprising that no one has ever figured out the complete life cycle of any deep-sea trematode. And the trematode’s journey to adulthood occurs on a scale virtually invisible to the human eye, in a place virtually inaccessible to the human body. The possibilities are not endless, but they are dizzying, especially when coupled with the fact that an adult trematode worm looks nothing like its younger selves, which can resemble anything from tadpoles to free-swimming slices of hairy salamis. We don’t know if the eggs move through a snail and then a polychaete worm before reaching the fish, or through a mussel and then a clam, or through a limpet and then a lobster. Finding an adult worm in a fish tells us nothing about the first two animals it used as hosts. It is a cinematic adolescence, full of trials (just how does one penetrate a mollusk?), tribulations (sustained attacks by its hosts’ immune systems), and a long-anticipated first encounter with sex (losing one’s virginity in the intestinal tract of a fish).īut our understanding of the deep-sea trematode’s life cycle ends with the zoarcid. In order for many species of trematodes to reach adulthood, the young worm must journey through the bodies of three other creatures, penetrating the first two and being eaten by the third, where it finally matures and reproduces sexually. Perhaps I should clarify that our intrepid young protagonist is not the zoarcid, but the eggs contained in its feces, eggs belonging to a parasitic worm called the trematode. ![]() ![]() For when the zoarcid poops, the bildungsroman begins. It weaves through tangles of tube worms and munches on snails, limpets, and worms, blissfully unaware of the saga taking place inside its body, and, to be very specific, its gastrointestinal tract. ![]() The site, called Nine North, is part of the East Pacific Rise, an underwater mountain range that stretches from the Gulf of California across the southeastern Pacific Ocean. It enjoys a spectacular view, at the bottom of a glittering black canyon 559 miles off the coast of Acapulco, Mexico. It lives in one of the cushiest parts of the deep sea, in the shimmering waters near a hydrothermal vent that warms the freezing seas to the temperature of a kiddie pool. Otherwise, the fish has no real reason to be grumpy. The fish in question, called a zoarcid, looks like a creature caught in an identity crisis, too long to be a fish but too short to be an eel, its lips permanently drooping in a sullen pout. In my personal opinion, the greatest coming-of-age story on Earth does not take place in a Dickens novel or a Disney movie, but rather in a white fish at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |