"“Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,” said Shana Goffredi, a professor and chair of biology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the study’s principal investigator."
I really don't think I would put eggs all over my body to graze for breakfast, but that's an interesting image.
I always consider this kind of weird unnecessary metaphor a big sign that the content was generated by ChatGPT, and I would be willing to bet that this professor was interviewed via email and got some "help" in writing her reply.
> In this symbiotic relationship, bacteria take up real estate on the spider’s exoskeletons, and in return, the microbes convert carbon-rich methane and oxygen into sugars and fats the spiders can eat
Doing all the work. Microbes get no respect.
But also, can we attach these to natural methane producers? (Eg decomposing stuff or cows)
I think you're unfairly dismissing the massive amount of nanotech R&D and energy it takes to develop and operate the bazillion-unit cooperative mobile megafortress those bacteria are happily renting.
Maybe not in the mainstream?! But for many years people have had jobs specifically trying to get microbes to do useful work for us. [0]
Look up key terms like "directed evolution" in microbial research - which to me sounds like a fancy phrase for "breeding". But when breeding cycles can be measured in minutes across millions of units for something so small we can't see it... it kind of is a different thing so I guess it's fair to differentiate it.
I would guess that they've evolved for the conditions around the seafloor, so rotting trash piles or cow stomachs might be a stretch (though cows might welcome some extra sugars, unlike garbage - though I am sure some other microbes could step in there).
What’s striking here isn’t just the spiders it’s the idea that living creatures can directly plug into chemical energy from the Earth without sunlight. That’s a whole ecosystem powered by methane instead of photosynthesis.
It’s funny how something as strange as a methane powered sea spider can make you rethink what “life” even means. Energy, structure, feedback it’s all there, just in a form we weren’t expecting. The deep sea keeps humbling us.
Someone asked 40 scientists what is their definition of life and the clustered them with LLMs. The results were incredibly varied: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15849
Black Smoker ecosystems may be remote, but they are still observable. I've often wondered about the possibilities for microbial ecosystems deep within the earth, at high temperatures and pressures. There could be implications for the formation of hydrocarbon deposits.
Ecosystems that long ago branched off from the ones we know of maybe, but I think small isolated pockets are unlikely places to find much innovation because they can much more easily fall into stable states where nothing much evolves.
> Even if 80% of the population are eaten (by the spiders), it’s worth it for the 20% to keep surviving and reproducing.
Some symbiosis
Float away from the methane and die, or if lucky attach to a predator that lives in the methane that will harvest you for consumption but not before you reproduce
> By analyzing isotopes in the spiders’ tissues, the scientists determined the bacteria weren’t just hitching a ride from an eight-legged friend — they were also being eaten.
> “This is really the beauty of the symbiosis between the two: The bacteria get that perfect Goldilocks zone with everything they need,” Dubilier said. “Even if 80% of the population are eaten (by the spiders), it’s worth it for the 20% to keep surviving and reproducing.”
Sure, but there's a more conventional term for this kind of symbiosis. Usually it would be called "farming". Humans have the same kind of symbiotic relationship with pigs, or wheat.
What do you think are all those deep sea platforms doing right now? We have been mining hydrocarbons from sea floor for decades now. Mostly burning the methane as "not worth the extra pipes" by product.
Most people can get on board with jumping spiders. Big eyes, recognizable behavior, fuzz like fur, aspect ratios that aren't foreign to mammals. But if they mean knobbly things that look like they came out off the sea floor / out of an alien film, yeah, I'll grant them that they have a special skill if they can find those cute.
As a non-arachnophobe, I don't find spiders of any kind to be cute. But I also don't find anything about their appearance or behaviour to be unpleasant or scary. They're just aesthetically unremarkable. Similar to, say, fish---I don't think most people will look at a fish and think either "ooh, so cute" or "weird alien thing, get it away from me", they just see a fish and don't really have any emotions about it.
Lots of fears are visceral, but even if we were to allow only verbalizable fears, one could imagine the arachnophobes thinking "what if this tiny spider burrows through my eyes or ears and lays eggs inside my brain, and then all the baby spiders stream out of my mouth and nostrils"
I like to imagine that they don't jump, they _teleport_. It's fascinating to watch them blip out of existence in one spot, or one orientation, and appear in another location in the same instant. Forget what it must be like to be a bat[1], what would it be like to be a tiny jumping spider?
I love spiders.. they're like mini steampunk machines.. powered by what is effectively hydraulics. (that why their legs curl up when they die.. the loss of hydraulic pressure)
This reminds me of a thought about veterinarians. What kind of person would be a veterinarian? A good portion of the job is putting down animals and treating suffering animals that can't speak. Either the vet is a psycho or a pure heart who can tank trauma all day long. I find suffering non human animals to be more traumatic as they can't speak, just emote. Anyway, thank goodness for vets.
It’s not quite that bad. My brother was a veterinarian and in his case, it was very much a vocation thing: he knew he wanted to be a veterinarian by the time he was maybe 10 or 11 and took a remarkably direct route there. The vast majority of the work was fairly routine care, and he had a unique gift for connecting with animals (most of his early career he did house call veterinary work and so many clients would talk about how their cat or dog was terrified of strangers but would just climb into his lap and let him do whatever he needed to do to care for the animal, whether it was trimming nails, examining teeth, taking blood or anything else). Euthanasia was something that he felt, but was able to get through for the other aspects of the job.
I have an ex who became a vet (kind of a surprise in that when we were dating she was an artist) and she has a house call practice with a lot of her work being euthanasia. I don’t know how she can manage that emotionally, but I’d like to believe she’s not a psycho even if she was the one who ended the relationship.
I have a vet friend that I talk to a lot. One thing that struck me was how many clients will bring in a dog with a serious, obvious malady (the one I remember was a dog with maggots in its anus, sorry for the visual) and will be like, “are you sure he’s in pain? He hasn’t been crying all day”. And it will be evident that this has been happening for weeks.
And then some people will bring their healthy pets into the clinic for euthanasia because they're going out of town for a while and don't want to arrange for care of the animal in the meantime. Or because keeping the animal even if they are not leaving town has become too inconvenient. Some people are pieces of work.
Fun fact: the King James Version of the Bible has several errors where it uses "thy" before a vowel sound. This might vary by edition, but I've verified some in a scan of the 1611 "he" bible. Unfortunately it's blackletter which I can't read quickly, and I really don't trust the OCR.
Semi-manual verse counts from a random digital copy I have convenient, before 'e' only:
(2 thy, 2 thine) elder
(2 thy, 0 thine) elect
(19 thy, 3 thine) estimation (most in the same chapter!)
("thy ewe" is correct due to pronunciation)
(1 thy, 0 thine) exceeding
(1 thy, 1 thine) excellency
(1 thy, 1 thine) expectation
(2 thy, 110 thine) eye
2 John, being short, is the only book that exclusively does it wrong. The other errors are in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Job, Proverbs, and Ezekiel, all of which also use the correct form.
(it also has errors before other vowels and 'h', though the 'u' one is debatable)
"“Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,” said Shana Goffredi, a professor and chair of biology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and the study’s principal investigator."
I really don't think I would put eggs all over my body to graze for breakfast, but that's an interesting image.
I always consider this kind of weird unnecessary metaphor a big sign that the content was generated by ChatGPT, and I would be willing to bet that this professor was interviewed via email and got some "help" in writing her reply.
> “We can’t ever hope to sustainably (use) the oceans if we don’t really understand the oceans.”
Yeah, something weird has happened to these quotes because nobody would intentionally put "use" in brackets like that.
> In this symbiotic relationship, bacteria take up real estate on the spider’s exoskeletons, and in return, the microbes convert carbon-rich methane and oxygen into sugars and fats the spiders can eat
Doing all the work. Microbes get no respect.
But also, can we attach these to natural methane producers? (Eg decomposing stuff or cows)
> Doing all the work. Microbes get no respect.
I think you're unfairly dismissing the massive amount of nanotech R&D and energy it takes to develop and operate the bazillion-unit cooperative mobile megafortress those bacteria are happily renting.
The real question is did they build it using agile or waterfall?
It took a billion years and ... mostly works.
I'd guess waterfall then.
test driven development!
Obviously, it was good ol' trial-and-error. Or rather, trial-and-the-least-error.
With all tech impressive tech, do the spiders feel it's beneath them to do those conversions themselves?
> Doing all the work. Microbes get no respect.
Maybe not in the mainstream?! But for many years people have had jobs specifically trying to get microbes to do useful work for us. [0]
Look up key terms like "directed evolution" in microbial research - which to me sounds like a fancy phrase for "breeding". But when breeding cycles can be measured in minutes across millions of units for something so small we can't see it... it kind of is a different thing so I guess it's fair to differentiate it.
[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2403585121
> But for many years people have had jobs specifically trying to get microbes to do useful work for us.
Well, you know, there's brewing and bread. I like beer. I like sauerkraut. I like bread.
Insulin is handy. So is human growth hormone.
I would guess that they've evolved for the conditions around the seafloor, so rotting trash piles or cow stomachs might be a stretch (though cows might welcome some extra sugars, unlike garbage - though I am sure some other microbes could step in there).
They are in cows and people and landfill as you'd expect.
Why would they not be?
If you want to increase their number you need to give them a better environment.
> methane-powered sea spiders on the ocean floor
Most steam-punk phrase I've heard in a good while.
Thermophiles living near hydrothermal vents are the real "steam"-punk
>Methane-powered sea spiders: Diverse, epibiotic methanotrophs serve as a source of nutrition for deep-sea methane seep Sericosura
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501422122
What’s striking here isn’t just the spiders it’s the idea that living creatures can directly plug into chemical energy from the Earth without sunlight. That’s a whole ecosystem powered by methane instead of photosynthesis.
It’s funny how something as strange as a methane powered sea spider can make you rethink what “life” even means. Energy, structure, feedback it’s all there, just in a form we weren’t expecting. The deep sea keeps humbling us.
Someone asked 40 scientists what is their definition of life and the clustered them with LLMs. The results were incredibly varied: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15849
This is like if Project Hail Mary and The Abyss teamed up to write a headline.
I enjoyed Project Hail Mary a lot. Would you recommend me “the Abyss”?
The Abyss is a movie by James Cameron, who also made Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic, and Avatar.
"The Abyss" is about a deep sea crew that encounters ... aliens...?
And yes, in general, I recommend The Abyss. It's definitely not the same as Project Hail Mary, but it does have similarities.
Can we put their genes into domesticated animal feed and knock it off with all the climate-hostile farting ?
At first I thought this was an Oil Gobbler[0] situation, only this time it's real!
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/oleophage-oil-gobblers
How do they breathe? That's what I'm wondering.
They exchange gases through pores in the skin--a fairly common process for things with cuticles
https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/221/8/jeb177568/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaneous_respiration
Black Smoker ecosystems may be remote, but they are still observable. I've often wondered about the possibilities for microbial ecosystems deep within the earth, at high temperatures and pressures. There could be implications for the formation of hydrocarbon deposits.
Ecosystems that long ago branched off from the ones we know of maybe, but I think small isolated pockets are unlikely places to find much innovation because they can much more easily fall into stable states where nothing much evolves.
Hmm. Does this mean we can seed life in Titan's methane seas?
Moreover: does it mean there's already life in Titan's methane seas?
Surface temperatures are below -180C. If there is life then their chemistry would be very different from Earth or any water based life.
Surface temperature, yes.
But deep in Titan's ocean? Not so much.
> Even if 80% of the population are eaten (by the spiders), it’s worth it for the 20% to keep surviving and reproducing.
Some symbiosis
Float away from the methane and die, or if lucky attach to a predator that lives in the methane that will harvest you for consumption but not before you reproduce
It’s like the symbiotic relationship between humans and livestock.
These sorts of relationships are common in earthly life.
It's not about being nice. It's about reproductive success, by any means.
> By analyzing isotopes in the spiders’ tissues, the scientists determined the bacteria weren’t just hitching a ride from an eight-legged friend — they were also being eaten.
> “This is really the beauty of the symbiosis between the two: The bacteria get that perfect Goldilocks zone with everything they need,” Dubilier said. “Even if 80% of the population are eaten (by the spiders), it’s worth it for the 20% to keep surviving and reproducing.”
Sure, but there's a more conventional term for this kind of symbiosis. Usually it would be called "farming". Humans have the same kind of symbiotic relationship with pigs, or wheat.
It reminds me of Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Movie in the works
“Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,”
I don't of anyone in history that had chicken eggs growing on their skin.
Yeah, that phrase sounds like it was written by an alien not particularly familiar with eating habits on Earth…
Nobody specified that these were _chicken_ eggs. Though that thought leads me in two different directions, neither of which is fit for polite company.
Luxury caviar-based face creams
>enriched with caviar extract
https://imgur.com/a/QAxGdP3
[dead]
I hope the notion of methane mining the ocean floor never takes off.
What do you think are all those deep sea platforms doing right now? We have been mining hydrocarbons from sea floor for decades now. Mostly burning the methane as "not worth the extra pipes" by product.
Who would study sea spiders? You'd have to look at and think about sea spiders all day. That's terrifying.
People who are not terrified of spiders, of course.
Arachnophobia (even the mild variety) is not universal. I know some people who think spiders are cute. It takes all kinds, I guess.
Most people can get on board with jumping spiders. Big eyes, recognizable behavior, fuzz like fur, aspect ratios that aren't foreign to mammals. But if they mean knobbly things that look like they came out off the sea floor / out of an alien film, yeah, I'll grant them that they have a special skill if they can find those cute.
As a non-arachnophobe, I don't find spiders of any kind to be cute. But I also don't find anything about their appearance or behaviour to be unpleasant or scary. They're just aesthetically unremarkable. Similar to, say, fish---I don't think most people will look at a fish and think either "ooh, so cute" or "weird alien thing, get it away from me", they just see a fish and don't really have any emotions about it.
I wasn't afraid of spiders until this week https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/yyk8cb/known_as_the_w...
Freaky, except they're only a few millimetres in size and considered harmless to humans.
It would be hard for a spider of medically significant size to suck down their exoskeleton like that.
Lots of fears are visceral, but even if we were to allow only verbalizable fears, one could imagine the arachnophobes thinking "what if this tiny spider burrows through my eyes or ears and lays eggs inside my brain, and then all the baby spiders stream out of my mouth and nostrils"
Why? You could probably wear those much like you would a ring or a bracelet.
I do believe there also is a song about them. It goes something like this: Anywhere you go, you always take your spider, your spider with you... ;)
Nope jumping spiders are the worst kind. So are big fuzzy spiders.
They're not insectlike, but in some weird uncanny valley between insect and mammal.
And they can JUMP onto you.
Nope nope nope.
Jumping spiders are quite intelligent and playful.
They will play 'catch the laser dot' with you like a cat does or even do little mating dances when you prop a mirror in front of them.
YouTube has many videos of such activities
Have a bit of fun with them next time you see one and your next encounter will not be so unpleasant!
-ex arachnaphobist
I like to imagine that they don't jump, they _teleport_. It's fascinating to watch them blip out of existence in one spot, or one orientation, and appear in another location in the same instant. Forget what it must be like to be a bat[1], what would it be like to be a tiny jumping spider?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
You might change your mind if you read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) or you might not.
I love spiders.. they're like mini steampunk machines.. powered by what is effectively hydraulics. (that why their legs curl up when they die.. the loss of hydraulic pressure)
This reminds me of a thought about veterinarians. What kind of person would be a veterinarian? A good portion of the job is putting down animals and treating suffering animals that can't speak. Either the vet is a psycho or a pure heart who can tank trauma all day long. I find suffering non human animals to be more traumatic as they can't speak, just emote. Anyway, thank goodness for vets.
It’s not quite that bad. My brother was a veterinarian and in his case, it was very much a vocation thing: he knew he wanted to be a veterinarian by the time he was maybe 10 or 11 and took a remarkably direct route there. The vast majority of the work was fairly routine care, and he had a unique gift for connecting with animals (most of his early career he did house call veterinary work and so many clients would talk about how their cat or dog was terrified of strangers but would just climb into his lap and let him do whatever he needed to do to care for the animal, whether it was trimming nails, examining teeth, taking blood or anything else). Euthanasia was something that he felt, but was able to get through for the other aspects of the job.
I have an ex who became a vet (kind of a surprise in that when we were dating she was an artist) and she has a house call practice with a lot of her work being euthanasia. I don’t know how she can manage that emotionally, but I’d like to believe she’s not a psycho even if she was the one who ended the relationship.
Just be happy you got out before she was a vet and knew how to practice euthanasia
Sadly, vets have a high suicide rate. This study found 1.6x the general population rate for male vets and 2.4% for females.
https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2019/09/04/veterina...
I have a vet friend that I talk to a lot. One thing that struck me was how many clients will bring in a dog with a serious, obvious malady (the one I remember was a dog with maggots in its anus, sorry for the visual) and will be like, “are you sure he’s in pain? He hasn’t been crying all day”. And it will be evident that this has been happening for weeks.
And then some people will bring their healthy pets into the clinic for euthanasia because they're going out of town for a while and don't want to arrange for care of the animal in the meantime. Or because keeping the animal even if they are not leaving town has become too inconvenient. Some people are pieces of work.
(2.4x, not 2.4%)
There's also that pet-vet jobs are rare compared to ag-vet jobs.
Know thy enemy.
Wouldn't it be "thine" enemy?
this is correct, because "enemy" starts with a vowel, but it's a fairly gratuitous translation either way, since "know your enemy" comes from Sun Tzu
Fun fact: the King James Version of the Bible has several errors where it uses "thy" before a vowel sound. This might vary by edition, but I've verified some in a scan of the 1611 "he" bible. Unfortunately it's blackletter which I can't read quickly, and I really don't trust the OCR.
Semi-manual verse counts from a random digital copy I have convenient, before 'e' only:
2 John, being short, is the only book that exclusively does it wrong. The other errors are in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Job, Proverbs, and Ezekiel, all of which also use the correct form.(it also has errors before other vowels and 'h', though the 'u' one is debatable)
For "enemy" it is always the correct "thine".
https://english.stackexchange.com/a/568647/
It's all correct in the original Hebrew. For example in "Ezekiel" 16:61
https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.16.61?lang=bi
Unfortunately I have an even harder time reading Hebrew fonts than I do reading English blackletter.