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One of the real surprises to me in college was…bacteria. Now I had encountered these characters before (I guess everybody has, since more of the cells in a human body are symbiotic bacteria living inside of us than are…well our own actual cells). However, in college I learned the full history of life on Earth. It is mostly a history of bacteria: multicellular creatures only show up for the last 600 million years. For over 3 billion years, the world belonged to the bacteria alone. I also learned about extremophiles—bacteria that can live in boiling hot temperatures or in oxygen-free environments. Some extremophiles can metabolize inorganic things like sulfur and arsenic. They can live without the light of the sun in the fathomless depths of the ocean on poisonous elements. The oxygen we breath was created as a waste product by these first archaebacteria. The planet’s atmosphere was once a reducing atmosphere, where paper would not burn (assuming you had any…billions of years before trees plants evolved, much less paper-makers). Bacteria made it an oxygen world where things burn…including our metabolisms. They changed the world in a fundamental way that we industrial humans with our infernal carbons cannot match.
The archaebacteria sound like aliens (indeed, there is a real possibility they actually originally were aliens), but they are also our great-great-great ever-so-great-to-the-100th power grandparents. I don’t need to wonder whether evolution is real: I have seen it in a science lab when we put a pellet of penicillin on a petri dish and watched as the bacteria evolved resistance to it (not really a super-smart experiment in hindsight, but a super-compelling one). I wish I could impress upon you how astonishing bacteria are. They are the true sacred seed of life–the undisputed masters of Earth.
However, this is old news. The new news is that there are so, so many more bacteria than we realized. The earth beneath our feet is filled with bacteria…but the stone beneath that is filled with bacteria too. And the weird hot putty beneath that stone (the gabbro) is also filled with bacteria. There are bacteria in the depths of the world. Living bacteria have been discovered in the gabbro 1400 meters beneath the basalt floor of the ocean. There is a barely discovered world of secret life deep beneath our feet—a true underworld of secret unknown species of micro-organisms. The size of this ecosystem is enormous.
To quote a news article from..yesterday, “The record depth at which life has been found in the continental subsurface is approximately 3 miles (5km) while the record in marine waters is 6.5 miles (10.5km) from the ocean surface.”
If these are the true boundaries of the underworld bacteria biome, it means that there is a region of secret life twice as large as all of the world’s oceans combined. Based on past experience though, it is not unreasonable to doubt that deeper pockets of bacteria will be discovered as our drilling and bio-assaying become more sophisticated.
Most of the super deep bacteria spend enormously long periods in suspended animation. Sometimes they enter a metabolic suspension so profound that they seem dead or inanimate (which is maybe how we missed them for so long). At present, scientists and writers are calling them “zombie-bacteria” because of their half-alive status (which seems like an appropriate nomen based on their underworld habitat).
I wish I could tell you more about this realm of life on Earth, but I can’t. Not only am I not a bacteriologist or geologist, additionally we (meaning all of humankind) simply don’t know the answers yet. More research is necessary. Sadly, it is probably going to be slow to materialize. Our leaders seem incapable of grasping that surface life needs to continue longer than a few decades (at least if they hope for meaningful long term economic growth). I shudder to imagine them furrowing their brows at the concept of vast stone oceans of zombie one-celled organisms…and explaining to their constituents why we need to know more about such things. But we DO need to know. In the synthetic ecosystems of my youth, the lack of coherent sustainable bacterial communities was the root cause of disastrous failure. I don’t think our new underworld friends are going to fail or die any time soon, no matter what we surface beings do, yet if we want to take life elsewhere than Earth we are going to need to understand them much better. Perhaps life did not spring from some pool of irradiated scum or arrive on a comet from beyond the solar system. Maybe it came from the hot depths. Maybe we are all underworld beings.
Here is one of the world’s rarest and strangest fish, the golden cave catfish (Clarias cavernicola) which can be found only one place on Earth, the Algamas/Dragonsbreath cave in the Namib Desert. This incredible cavern is 100 meters (300 feet) beneath the desert and it holds the world’s largest known underground lake (discounting all subglacial lakes—which can be huge). Above ground is an arid desert wasteland, but in cave is a huge lake where unfathomed waters may descend another 100 meters into the Earth. Since only a narrow chasm opens to the sky, the lake has a very limited ecosystem built around whatever falls into this chasm (which was only discovered by science in 1986). These blind ascetic catfish dwell on such scraps and on the white shrimp and strange aquatic worms which live in the water beneath the desert. Though they have lost their eyes, their other senses have become extremely acute in order to find every bug or speck of nutrient which falls into the hidden lake. Additionally, these small (16 cm/6 inch) fish have a limited ability to sip air–so that they can better survive the still and anaerobic depths of their hidden lake. The entire species may only consist of a few hundred (or thousand) individuals.
We have a nasty habit of becoming unduly obsessed by the demographics of the United States. This is to overlook the fascinating demographics of the world’s most populous country, China, where the immense number of people means that there are subgroups larger than very large nations. For example, contemporary Chinese policymakers and planners agonize over “the ant tribe.”
The ant tribe is a neologism used to describe certain people born in the 1980s in China’s countryside and small towns. These kids (who are often one-child-policy children) worked incredibly hard to get into universities (while their parents scrimped and saved to send them there). Once they had a degree they moved to China’s giant cities in order to pursue middle class prosperity…and there they ran straight into a problem which transforms them into ants.
Welcome to the beautiful Super Cities of Contemporary China
Chinese citizens (or “subjects”?) are tethered to a document known as a hukou—a household permit. The hukou, like some sort of medieval serfdom or indenture, trails the bearer throughout life and then applies to their offspring, no matter where they are born. So ant-tribe young people move to Guanzhou, Beijing, or Shanghai in order to get worthwhile office jobs which do not exist elsewhere but they are not officially allowed to live there. Their solution is to move underground: the great cities of China are filled with illegal basement and sub-basement apartments which are the tiny damp bedrooms of sexless, hardworking, subterranean office drones—the ant tribe.
To quote The Globe and Daily Mail:
The “ants” are not indigent beggars or lost souls (who could not afford even sub-basement rent) or low-wage workers (who generally live in workers’ dormitories, 10 to 12 of them to a room, but above ground). Rather, they are ambitious citizens who have been driven underground, literally and figuratively, in their quest for middle-class stability. Their mildewed lives are the material embodiment of something being endured by countless millions of Chinese today, as they attempt to balance President Xi Jinping’s ambition of creating a middle-class China with his party’s desire to control and regulate their lives.
The ants live in extreme penury. They spend all of their money on rent, bribes, and, eventually, on school fees (without the proper hukou, Children can’t attend school in Beijing unless certain parties are remunerated). So contemporary China has a larger middle class than it seems to, but it is held back by communist mandarins’ unwillingness to extend people basic property rights or the right to move freely around the country. China is always touted as the next big thing–the country that will make the future–yet if the clerks, bureaucrats, marketers, salespeople, and number crunchers who are the mainstay of a tertiary sector economy must lead lives of monastic self abnegation (and possibly forgo having families of any size), I see little hope for China’s long term prospects. The rulers of China must decide whether they want to completely control their people or allow them to flourish. They seem to have decided on the former…which makes me wonder if this may be the era of “peak China” and the future may be a lot less Sinocentric than everyone says.
Or maybe we are all destined to live crammed in underground cells with legally questionable identities and China is the innovator of a terrible future (there is ample historical precedent after all)…but I hope not.
Minthe (source unknown)
Aside from the disturbing tale of his coercive romance with Persephone, there aren’t many myths about the underworld god Hades’ love life…but there is one weird love triangle story. The river Cocytus flows underground for part of its course. Because of this it was strongly affiliated with the underworld in Classical thought. There is a story about this—and an origin myth for one of our very favorite garden herbs.
Nymph in green light by W. Szczepanska
One of the river nymphs of the Cocytus, Minthe had a peculiar temperament. Because of the geography of the river, she spent part of her time in the shady realm below, and there the gorgeous river maiden became enamored of Hades. Some mythmakers speculate that her affection was really for his wealth, power, magic, or for his splendid chariot of chthonic jewels, but, whatever the case, Minthe devoted all of her beauty and wiles to beguiling the god (who usually received scant positive attention). Minthe would probably have succeeded in seducing the lord of the underworld but his wife Persephone chanced upon the scene. The goddess may or may not have cared for her dark husband, but she was certainly a jealous queen!
Persephone and Minthe (an enigmatic unattributed image from Deviantart.com)
Using her own dark magic, Persephone transfigured Minthe into a weed…but the divine beauty, attractiveness, and sweet smell of the naiad stayed with the plant, and thus was mint created. The story makes even more sense in a Greco-Roman context when mint was used in funerary rites to disguise the scent of decay. The herb was also a main ingredient in the fermented barley drink called kykeon, which seemingly was the principal potable associated with the Eleusinian mysteries. Based on accounts of the shadowy rights, it seems like this beverage had more than beer and mint in it and included some really strange psychoactive ingredients. Yet mint itself has some powerful active ingredients, and we are coming to believe it is a more powerful stimulant than initially thought. Indeed mint has an ancient heritage as a medicine, flavoring, and crop. The beloved plant merits more explanation than just this strange underworld myth—so I will write the second half of this post tomorrow!
Peppermint
The Amazon River is renowned for having the greatest diversity of catfish of any river—oh, and it is also the largest river in the world too, I guess. The river drains half of South America and its branches flows through many many different sorts of regions. Near Tena in Ecuador, the river’s tributaries flow through a karst landscape of sunken limestone caves, streams and springs. There, deep beneath the rainforest, scientists have discovered a catfish with a remarkable ability to climb walls—or perhaps I should say they have rediscovered a previously known fish and found out it has unexpected talents.
The cave-climbing catfish (photograph by Geoff Hoese)
A team of naturalists led by Geoff Hoese found the catfish in a subterranean waterway jauntily climbing up a sheer 3 meter (10 foot) stone wall with a thin rivulet running down it. Here is a link to a National Geographic article about the catfish—you can go there and watch a video of the catfish shimmying up and down water-slicked rocks. The scientists believe the fish is Chaetostoma microps, a member of the suckermouth armored catfish family (Loricariidae), a group of animals which Ferrebeekeeper has enthused about in past posts (although the fish’s identity remains unclear—since the team had no permit for taking specimens and left the creature unmolested still climbing its underground walls).
An illustration of Chaetostoma microps
Chaetostoma microps is not notably specialized for cave life—it still has pigment and eyes, and lacks the marked asceticism of other true underdwellers like the pink catfish Phreatobius cisternarum (which lives beneath the water table!) Chaetostoma microps feeds on algae—which is notably lacking from underground caves. So what exactly is the fish doing down there? And how/why did it evolve its remarkable ability to climb rocks without much water? The answers are unclear, but it seems reasonable to assume that a fish from the vertiginous yet cave-studded foothills of the Andes would need the ability to climb in order to maximize its habitat (and to prevent being sucked into an inescapable underground grotto). Maybe Chaetostoma microps is really a mountaineer catfish. Instead of leaping like salmon, it deals with its rocky treacherous home by suction, barbels, and indomitable spirit!
Across the vast continent of North America temperatures have plummeted. As I write this, sub-zero winds sweep across the Great Plains. Buffalo is seemingly gone–buried beneath uncounted tons of lake-effect snow. Obviously, with all of this November cold, Americans are obsessed with one question: what happens to snakes in the winter?
This seems somehow wrong.
Snakes live in places that get very cold during the winter, yet the poor reptiles are cold-blooded and can’t be slithering around in snow and ice. In fact, considering that their bodies become the same temperature as their surroundings, how do they avoid becoming snakecicles? What happens to them when the mercury dips?
Technically speaking, snakes (and other reptiles & amphibians who live in climes which turn cold) do not hibernate—they brumate. Brumation is a different sort of metabolic dormancy than mammalian hibernation, but there are many similarities. When reptiles go dormant, their breathing and heart rate drop to almost nil. Brumating reptiles do not eat (or produce waste)—though they wake up occasionally from their dormancy to drink water.
Garter Snakes dormant in a hibernaculum
As temperatures dip in autumn, temperate reptiles get all Roman and they seek out a hibernaculum—a sheltered environment which protects them throughout the winter. Hibernaculums are usually deep within the ground in holes, crevices, and burrows which reach beneath the frost line. Certain species of snakes brumate together to share trace warmth. Just imagine a colony of hundreds of little garter snakes in suspended animation beneath a snow covered rock wall in that picturesque New England snowscape!
Wait, where are the snakes?
Although it is not exactly the topic of this post, amphibians and aquatic reptiles also brumate—sometimes underwater or deep within the wet mud at the very bottom of ponds and lakes! The turtles, frogs, and newts take in sufficient oxygen through their skin to stay alive in their deeply reduced metabolic state—although they occasionally wake up from their torpor and swim about. An indelible memory of my childhood is seeing some little newt swimming beneath the ice of the frozen cranberry bog which I was standing on!
When spring comes and temperatures become warm enough, the snakes depart from their underground dens and sun themselves until they have sufficient energy to become active. Of course some reptiles live in such wintry locations that they have very little summer. There are snakes (like northern rattlesnakes) which brumate 8 months out of the year! Scientists believe that this prolonged dormancy allows the snakes to live longer—like an automobile turned off in a safe garage.
Garter snakes awaken en masse in the spring
Like bee hives, ant colonies have all sorts of specialized ants. Soldier ants with mighty mandibles guard the hive. The queen ant becomes a gargantuan reproductive machine and pumps out an endless swarm of underlings. Drone ants develop wings to fly high into the air to mate with fledgling queens. Yet the strangest of all ant jobs (to my mind at least) is held by honeypot ants.
Honeypot ant repletes (Camponotus inflatus) hanging from the roof a hive tunnel
Honeypot ants are found in six or seven genera of seasonal ants located in Africa, Australia, Melanesia, and North America. The ants function as living granaries/reservoirs. They find an underground location deep in the hive and use their own bodies as storehouses to protect the hive from drought and famine. As soon as they develop from larvae, the specialized honeypot ants transform into grapelike spheroids capable of ballooning to many time the size of normal ants. During the rainy season, when food is plentiful, worker ants stuff the honeypot ants to the edge of bursting with prey and provender. These living warehouses can store liquids, body fat, and water for long periods in their grotesquely distended abdomens. When the dry season hits and resources become scarce, worker ants stroke the antennae of the honeypot ants and the latter to disgorge their precious stores of liquids and nutrients.
image credit: lonelyplanetimages.com
Living deep underground, honeypot ants are seldom seen by people. They were first documented in 1881 by Henry Christopher McCook (a civil war chaplain, polymath, and entomological pioneer). Yet hunter gatherers have known of them since time immemorial. The strange grapelike ants are regarded as a unique delicacy to Australia’s indigenous people who have worked the strange bulbous ants into stories of the dreamtime—the ancient magical creation of the world. Of course the world is not finished and the dreamtime is still ongoing and honeypot ants are out there, engorged in the darkness, doing their part. We just never see them.
Imagine working deep inside a mine in medieval Cornwall. Darkness is all around you, barely broken by the hot sputtering oil lamp. Breathing poisonous air, you have carved deep into an underworld of granite using simple handtools and brute strength. You are seeking precious ore for some greedy lord when suddenly an unearthly knocking sound starts to come from the walls and ceilings and the whole mine starts to shudder. It’s the knockers, the spirits of the mine!
The Works of an Abandoned Cornish Mine
Cornwall is a peninsula of ancient rock which juts out from the southern tip of Great Britain. When the continent Laurussia slammed into Gondwana during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, the complicated geology of colliding plates caused a massive intrusion of magma to push up into the native rocks. This magma cooled into huge swaths of granite which underwent extensive metamorphism and mineralisation during subsequent ages—a process which left the area which rich seams of various metals. Mining began in Cornwall by at least 2150 BC–when tin was critical to bronze making– and it continued until 1998 AD (and it could restart at any time in accordance with the schizophrenic dictates of the world economy). Various periods have seem particular flurries of mining activity—particularly the middle ages and the Industrial revolution, but the vocation has always been an underlying part of the Cornish character. The myth of the knockers is a major part of that tradition.
The Knockers (unknown artist, woodblock print?)
The knockers were conceived of as a fairytale race of hard-working dwarf-like miners. The height of children, the hardscrabble little men possessed the clothes and tools of underground laborers and the work ethic of supernatural beings. Although they existed slightly beyond human kin, the knockers could be occasionally apprehended at the edges of perception–where the light faded in the depths of the pit, or just around a braced corner. The knockers were thought to be pranksters. They would steal tools or put out lights. To some miners, the knockers were evil beings who would knock down the supports holding up the shaft. The majority of miners however thought were benevolent imps or even the spirits of miners who dug too deep and died crushed in the blackness. When the mine walls started to groan and pop, it was the knockers trying to warn the miners of imminent collapse.
An illustration of Knockers (who are unaccountably hanging out with a fossil ichthyosaur)
There idea of magical miners was widespread in Europe. The Germans talked about the kobald–the goblin miners who poisoned the deep shafts. The Scandinavians believed in different races of dwarves. The tunnels beneath the burial mounds of Ireland were thought to be the haunt of leprechauns hoarding pots of gold. Yet of all these underground folks, the knockers seem to play the biggest part in the life of the Cornish miners. The men demanded that mine bosses propitiate the knockers in various ways. Individual miners took care to throw the last bite of their famous Cornish pasties to the knockers.
Knockers dress differently but share a thirst with Leprechauns.
As the world changed the mining industry changed: Cornish miners emigrated to other lands to share their expertise (and to share the profits of new strikes). They played a substantial part in America’s mining boom and they brought their traditions with them to the mines of the new world. The knockers morphed into the tommyknockers, but otherwise changed very little in the copper, silver, and gold mines of the old west. As a remarkable post script to the age of Cornish-American mining, when a huge California metal mine closed in 1956 and sealed the entrance, the former workers petitioned the owners to reopen the door, so the tommyknockers could leave and seek new jobs– a request which was granted.
Here at Ferrebeekeeper we have reviewed giant catfish, upside down catfish, coral reef catfish, and tiny parasitic catfish. We have described electrical catfish that jolt their prey with great sizzling bolts of energy and catfish that walk on land. There is such a bewildering proliferation of different catfish that surely we must finally be running out of these magnificent creatures.
Phreatobius cisternarum (photo from Janice Muriel-Cunha on Planet Catfish)
Not at all. Today’s featured species of catfish is Phreatobius cisternarum, a Brazilian fish which is lives in phreatic habitats. Hydrologists will be sitting up in alarm because this means the catfish lives beneath the water table: it is literally an underground catfish. When people in parts of Brazil dig wells they find this catfish is already there! Although to be fair, the fishes are discovered in shallow wells but do not live deep down in confined aquifers (at least not that we know of).
The Water Table with Confined and Unconfined Aquifers (USGS)
Phreatobius cisternarum lives both to the north and the south of the Amazon River delta as well as on the Island of Marajó (a freshwater island approximately the same area as Switzerland). It is not a large fish. The biggest specimens grow to 2.2 inches in length (5.5 centimetres). Phreatobius cisternarum also does not seem to be a particularly gregarious catfish: individuals pass their time in the darkness hiding motionlessly in crevices waiting for the macro-invertebrates they feed on (worms being a particular favorite). With broad heads, vestigial eyes, and vermiform fins, there is something chthonic about these little catfish.
The fish are a distinctive blood red color because they exchange oxygen through their gas permeable skin. Not only do the tiny fish utilize cutaneous respiration, they also are known (like many catfish) to sip air for its gaseous oxygen. Living in subterranean waters which have little soluble oxygen, these catfish have learned to maximize every atom of the precious gas. For a long time Phreatobius cisternarum was the only known member of this genus, but in 2007 two new Phreatobius species were discovered underground. These two species, P. dracunculus and P. sanguijuela, are entirely eyeless. Little is known of Phreatobius cisternarum: the creature’s mating rituals, lifespan, and habits remain a mystery. Even less is known of the two new species.
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