Deep-sea scientists first identified them in 2002, growing like a shaggy carpet on a whale skeleton they came across by chance at a depth of nearly 10,000 feet in California’s Monterey Bay. A deep-diving robot brought back samples that revealed they were not plants but bone-eating worms, now officially called Osedax – bone eaters in Latin. Q&A
What is the Discovered in the deep series?
projection The ocean is one of the world’s last truly wild places. It is filled with fascinating species that sometimes seem to border on the absurd, from fish that look up through transparent heads to golden snails with iron armor. We know more about deep space than we do about the deep oceans, and science is just beginning to scratch the surface of the rich variety of life in the deep. As mining companies push to industrialize the seabed and world leaders continue to tussle over how to protect the high seas, a new Guardian Seascape series will showcase some of the most recently discovered weird, wonderful, majestic, ridiculous, hard-hitting and impressive creatures. . They reveal how much there is still to learn about Earth’s least-known environment – and how much we need to protect. Thanks for your response. Once scientists knew how to look for them, the search for bone-eating worms – also known as zombie worms – began in earnest. Groups dragged dead whales out into the open and sunk them in the deep. Landers deliver parcels of animal bones to the sea floor – pigs, cows, turkeys – and then retrieve them months or years later to see what has infected them. “Basically, where we put bones, we find [the worms]says Greg Rouse of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, and one of the team that found and described Osedax. So far more than 30 species have been found from all over the world. There is the bone-eating mucus flower, Osedax mucofloris, first found in Sweden. Osedax fenrisi was discovered near a hydrothermal vent over 2,000 meters deep in the Arctic and was named in 2020 after the son of the Norse god Loki, Fenris the wolf. The bone-eating worm ranges in size from the length of a little finger to smaller than an eyelash. Those seen with the naked eye are usually female. Males are mostly tiny and do not eat bones. They live in “harems” of tens or hundreds inside the mucous tube of a female and wait for her eggs to hatch in order to fertilize them immediately. All the energy these midget males get comes from their mothers through their egg yolks. Once they use up this energy reserve, they die. “We called them kamikaze males,” says Robert Vrijenhoek, a retired evolutionary biologist from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, California, who was also part of the original team that found Osedax. The bone-eating mucus flower, Osedax mucofloris, is seen in the water with winged tendrils coming from its head and a cluster of roots at the other end. Photo: Natural History Museum/Alamy One species, Osedax priapus, does things differently. Rouse and his colleagues named it after the ancient Greek god of fertility, as depicted in erotic frescoes. These males are similar in size to females and have a long, elongated trunk that they use to reach along the bone. “I call this wandering the bone,” says Rouse. When they find females, these males provide sperm stored in their heads. To feed, Osedax bores holes in bones by producing acid in the same way that humans produce stomach acid. Paleontologists, in an effort to discover when Osedax worms evolved, found tell-tale holes in the fossilized bones of a 100-million-year-old plesiosaur, one of the giant marine reptiles that once roamed the ocean. Genetic studies support the theory that Osedax has been around since at least the Cretaceous period, long before there were whale skeletons around to feast on. Despite all the new species found, no one has yet spotted Osedax larvae. It is not clear how the worms find bones. It is believed that they may drift until they spot a skeleton, perhaps guided by chemicals that ripple through the water. Studies of Osedax DNA show that these worms live in huge, interconnected populations, possibly making stepping stones from the skeletons of whales and other large vertebrates stripped by scavengers. “Osedax probably just jumps, skips and jumps all the way to the ocean,” says Vrijenhoek.
