Several weeks ago, a commenter requested that I write up some stuff on chemosynthesis. While that seems pretty trivial, and the general details are trivial, the more I dug the more fascinating the research became and I became lost in the rabbit hole of research.
Have you ever just sat and started reading a random Wikipedia article? Then clicked on a link and another link and another…
I’m doing the same with chemosynthesis.
I’ve been learning about whale-falls. That’s when a whale dies and the carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. It becomes a massive colony of organisms, some of which live in multiple generations on the remains. In the end, chemosynthetic organisms use whale-falls as bridges to other areas of the ocean, similar to the island hopping campaign of the Pacific Theater in World War II.
Some of these research articles are old and I’m lucky to find them in various places. This is one of those concepts that is so well known, it’s difficult to find the origin of the idea. I’ve got a (very hard to read) scan of a 1964 paper from a Russian scientist on chemosynthesis and it refers to more articles from the very early 50s.
It’s a fun rabbit hole. But it’s a private rabbit hole too. It’s difficult to share the little bits of things that are so fascinating without explaining everything… and I haven’t really gotten started on that yet.
The world is truly an amazing place and we’ve known some things for a long time. But non-experts don’t know these kinds of things. I don’t know many people (though I do know a few, who are like me) that care what the benthic communities of the Black Sea are like and why and how they evolved to be that way.
It’s not the writing that’s the hard part. It’s organizing the thoughts that is the hard part. Well, writing can be hard because I tend to think much faster than I type and forget all the things I wanted to say.
OK, now I’m just rambling. Suffice to say that an article on chemosynthesis is coming and soon.
