Oh Wow!

[catsittingstill]

BMC Biology, an online public access science journal, has / will have / an account of anaerobic (uses no oxygen) multicellular life.

I thought this Just Did. Not. Happen. 

It is, admittedly, pretty simple life, tiny deep sea critters from the phylum Loricifera--they look a bit like squids in the picture but members of this phylum apparently top out at 1 mm long.  The phylum apparently lives in marine gravel, and the organisms stick themselves quite firmly to the solids in their environment. They've only been known since 1983, but have been found all over the world.

These particular anaerobic ones live in a deep sea basin in the Mediterranean.

It's very cool to be wrong about this, and I'm looking forward to reading the articles when they leave provisional status.  If you want to read the provisional pdfs they can be found from this page.

Frankly I have no idea why they didn't publish in Nature; in my opinion it's plenty important enough to belong there.  But I'm very glad they went with an open-access journal.

Comments

[sedge]

Wowowowow wow NIFTY.

[catsittingstill]

:-) Yeah. I have the provisional articles as pdfs and will read them tomorrow if I can squeeze the time in.

[patoadam]

One sentence jumped out at me:

"Are there metazoans on other planets with atmospheres different from our own?"

That's exactly what I was wondering.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yes. Isn't it cool? :-)

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Cool! I didn't even know there were anaerobic eukaryotes.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I thought there weren't any. I thought oxygen was necessary for multicellular life because it's high electronegativity made it such a good electron sink. I'm really surprised by this development and look forward to finding out more.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

That is indeed very cool.

In other science news, the NYT reports that element 117 has been synthesized.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I saw that. A bit out of my field but cool also.