Science Show

When researchers examined carcasses of whales in the North Sea they thought they knew what sort of creatures to expect, but they were surprised to find a marine worm which appears to be specialised to eat only dead whale meat. This creature is new to science and has been named Osedax mucofloris, which translates as bone-eating snot-flower.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: And so to small animals on big whales - there are some that seem to live nowhere else. This is Adrian Glover, who actually takes advantage of those sadly stranded whales which die, to see what happens next.

Adrian Glover: It's more a question of waiting around until a whale washes up on the seashore close to where you are operating and we were very, very lucky in a sense, that this minke whale that we sunk washed up just a few hours boat trip from our well-equipped marine lab, so it was relatively straightforward. I say straightforward, but actually it's quite complicated sinking a whale, it's kind of a messy, smelly business.

Robyn Williams: So you actually took one and sunk one?

Adrian Glover: Yes, exactly. We took one, we've taken two now in shallow water in the North Sea, Swedish coast. One was a six metre minke whale and the other was a four metre pilot whale and we sunk one at 120 metres and one at 30 metres and we're essentially studying the succession over time of animals that colonise these unusual habitats.

Robyn Williams: How long does it take in those colder waters for a whale to be eaten up?

Adrian Glover: Well, we actually don't know. I mean that's something you would think we would know the answer to, but we don't know. We sunk a minke whale carcass two years ago and it's still there and it's still clearly supporting quite a diverse and unusual 'whale fall' fauna, as we call it.

Robyn Williams: But down to the skeleton, how long do you think?

Adrian Glover: The carcass at 120 metres was skeletonised in about 8 months, so - mainly by scavenging organisms, hagfish, which are the most foul and disgusting deep sea creatures you'll ever meet.

Robyn Williams: A bit like lamprey, those jawless fish.

Adrian Glover: Yes, a jawless eel-like fish, which essentially they sit on the sea floor and wait for a large food parcel such as a dead fish, or even better for them a whale carcass, to sink down and then they very rapidly consume the flesh over just a matter of a few months depending on the size of the whale carcass.

Robyn Williams: They just attach themselves and suck.

Adrian Glover: Yeah, they sort of have a sort of writhing wriggling motion. If you've seen videos of this, it's something straight out of a horror movie really.

Robyn Williams: So you have a fair idea of what should be on the whale carcass. What made you think that there might be something new there as well?

Adrian Glover: Well we had a fair idea from the huge amount of work that's gone on on deep sea whale carcases, mainly in the Pacific that we would find some unusual, perhaps specialised organisms that actually are able to take advantage of the whale bone environment. But what we didn't really expect was deep sea related animals living on a shallow water whale carcass and that was real surprise to us, because the shallow water environment is quite different to the deep sea in many ways. So we were surprised to find specialised whale animals in the shallow water.

Robyn Williams: So OK, describe what happened when you first spotted this new creature?

Adrian Glover: We actually we only spotted it after bringing up a whale bone. We managed to recover one by - sort of Heath Robinson style - attaching a scoop to the front of the ROV, remotely operated vehicle. And these vary in size and shape, ours is something the size of a small suitcase. You just throw it off the side of the ship, send it down and we managed to drive it into the sediment around the whale bone, scoop up the sediment and then essentially haul in the ROV with the whale bone attached. And we took it back to the lab, which is only sort of ten minutes by boat, and prodded it and looked at it, and because it had become a bit of a joke that we were going to find these unusual deep sea animals on these whale carcasses. We were sitting there looking at it, and actually my collaborator, Thomas, wandered off for a while and he wandered back, and he was actually colour blind and we were sitting there looking at the whale bone and he said, Ah, nothing on it. And then I noticed some red spots on it and we popped it into the aquarium tank and suddenly these rather beautiful animals emerged from the whale bone and we were tremendously excited of course, because this was clearly a deep sea whale fall specialist related to the really unusual animals that had been described from deep sea whales in the Pacific. So it was quite an exciting moment.

Robyn Williams: Not huge, but I can see a picture of the creature in front of me and before it was moving, waving with feather-like things at the top. If you can imagine this sort of clump of stuff, which presumably is flesh down the bottom and then the stalk and then three or four great big fans, feather-like things waving about that's a kind of worm - what do you call it?

Adrian Glover: Oh, we're calling this species Osedax mucofloris, which translated from the Latin would be bone-eating snot flower, because we think they're quite flower like. They have this flower-like structure which protrudes out of the bone surface and then even a root which is embedded in the bone and in fact, akin to flowers, the root structure seems to provide the nutritional element to this animal in that there are bacteria, or certainly the evidence the researchers working on the deep sea animals have discovered is that there are bacteria in these roots actually using lipids or oils or perhaps other chemicals inside the whale bone itself to provide energy for the animal.

Robyn Williams: So they're absolutely specialised really for eating bits of dead whale/

Adrian Glover: It seems to be the case that certainly so far we've only found them on cetacean in fact large balænopterid
cetacean whale bones. It would be very exciting of course if these things were also present on perhaps dolphin or small cetaceans, but the large whales are very unique in the fact that they have these very large heavy bones, heavy oil rich bones and it may well be the case that they are specialised on that, I mean, we haven't yet found them on cetacean bones other than large ones so that's actually one of our next lines of enquiry, because if these things are actually present on dolphins and porpoises as well that greatly expands the range of potential habitats for them in deep and shallow water.

Robyn Williams: Now in my innocence I would imagine that, despite the fact that whales are pretty damned big, on the ocean's floor you wouldn't get that many lying around and therefore, if you're a tiny, however gorgeous worm looking for somewhere to live, how do you find the whale?

Adrian Glover: Well, in many ways that's the holy grail of deep sea biology and it's something that nobody has ever really been able to answer; how on Earth do these small marine invertebrates just a few centimetres or millimetres long, disperse between isolated ephemeral habitats such as whale carcasses or even other habitats such as hydrothermal vents. And what we think is that they have long lived larval dispersal phases and that they're simply capable of living in the water column for a long period as larvae and that the adults produce an enormous number of larvae, most of which will simply never make it anywhere, and just one or two arriving on a whale carcass will be able to reproduce very quickly and send out more larvae into the water column. Somehow they do it, we don't really know how but they do it.

Robyn Williams: Now as for implications, it so happens that I'm fond of polychætes and other marine worms but I should imagine that most of the population wouldn't get that galvanised by a lowly worm being found, however much on a large carcass. But in terms of really discovering something new in the North Sea where there's a huge amount of study done, is this a really big deal?

Adrian Glover: Well, we think it is - it is a big deal. This is an environment where really people had thought that they'd found everything. I mean, the shallow water marine environment in the North Sea is surrounded by marine labs; going back hundreds of years they've been collecting and identifying and describing animals from this region. And here we have just five minutes from one of the largest marine labs in Sweden, Sweden being an area of excellent taxonomic and marine biological expertise, and we found a completely new species of organism living on a totally novel habitat. So we're very excited by it and it's really captured our imagination and I think many people would be interested in this.

Guests

Dr Adrian Glover
Polychaete Researcher Zoology Natural History Museum London
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/departments/zoology/index.html

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

Polly Rickard and David Fisher

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