[HN Gopher] First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on ...
___________________________________________________________________
First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-06-21 15:29 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >Methane-powered sea spiders: Diverse, epibiotic methanotrophs
| serve as a source of nutrition for deep-sea methane seep
| Sericosura
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501422122
| pstuart wrote:
| I hope the notion of methane mining the ocean floor never takes
| off.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > methane-powered sea spiders on the ocean floor
|
| Most steam-punk phrase I've heard in a good while.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Thermophiles living near hydrothermal vents are the real
| "steam"-punk
| odie5533 wrote:
| Who would study sea spiders? You'd have to look at and think
| about sea spiders all day. That's terrifying.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| People who are not terrified of spiders, of course.
|
| Arachnophobia (even the mild variety) is not universal. I know
| some people who think spiders are cute. It takes all kinds, I
| guess.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Most people can get on board with jumping spiders. Big eyes,
| recognizable behavior, fuzz like fur, aspect ratios that
| aren't foreign to mammals. But if they mean knobbly things
| that look like they came out off the sea floor / out of an
| alien film, yeah, I'll grant them that they have a special
| skill if they can find those cute.
| tomcam wrote:
| I wasn't afraid of spiders until this week https://www.redd
| it.com/r/pics/comments/yyk8cb/known_as_the_w...
| classichasclass wrote:
| Freaky, except they're only a few millimetres in size and
| considered harmless to humans.
|
| It would be hard for a spider of medically significant
| size to suck down their exoskeleton like that.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Not all fears are rational, but even if we were to allow
| only rational fears, one could imagine the arachnophobes
| thinking "what if this tiny spider burrows through my
| eyes or ears and lays eggs inside my brain, and then all
| the baby spiders stream out of my mouth and nostrils"
| colanderman wrote:
| Nope jumping spiders are the worst kind. So are big fuzzy
| spiders.
|
| They're not insectlike, but in some weird uncanny valley
| between insect and mammal.
|
| And they can JUMP onto you.
|
| Nope nope nope.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Know thy enemy.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| Wouldn't it be "thine" enemy?
| tessierashpool wrote:
| this is correct, because "enemy" starts with a vowel, but
| it's a fairly gratuitous translation either way, since
| "know your enemy" comes from Sun Tzu
| fracus wrote:
| This reminds me of a thought about veterinarians. What kind of
| person would be a veterinarian? A good portion of the job is
| putting down animals and treating suffering animals that can't
| speak. Either the vet is a psycho or a pure heart who can tank
| trauma all day long. I find suffering non human animals to be
| more traumatic as they can't speak, just emote. Anyway, thank
| goodness for vets.
| dhosek wrote:
| It's not quite that bad. My brother was a veterinarian and in
| his case, it was very much a vocation thing: he knew he
| wanted to be a veterinarian by the time he was maybe 10 or 11
| and took a remarkably direct route there. The vast majority
| of the work was fairly routine care, and he had a unique gift
| for connecting with animals (most of his early career he did
| house call veterinary work and so many clients would talk
| about how their cat or dog was terrified of strangers but
| would just climb into his lap and let him do whatever he
| needed to do to care for the animal, whether it was trimming
| nails, examining teeth, taking blood or anything else).
| Euthanasia was something that he felt, but was able to get
| through for the other aspects of the job.
|
| I have an ex who became a vet (kind of a surprise in that
| when we were dating she was an artist) and she has a house
| call practice with a lot of her work being euthanasia. I
| don't know how she can manage that emotionally, but I'd like
| to believe she's not a psycho even if she was the one who
| ended the relationship.
| whycome wrote:
| > In this symbiotic relationship, bacteria take up real estate on
| the spider's exoskeletons, and in return, the microbes convert
| carbon-rich methane and oxygen into sugars and fats the spiders
| can eat
|
| Doing all the work. Microbes get no respect.
|
| But also, can we attach these to natural methane producers? (Eg
| decomposing stuff or cows)
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I would guess that they've evolved for the conditions around
| the seafloor, so rotting trash piles or cow stomachs might be a
| stretch (though cows might welcome some extra sugars, unlike
| garbage - though I am sure some other microbes could step in
| there).
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Doing all the work. Microbes get no respect.
|
| I think you're unfairly dismissing the massive amount of
| nanotech R&D and energy it takes to develop and operate the
| bazillion-unit _cooperative mobile megafortress_ those bacteria
| are happily renting.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| The real question is did they build it using agile or
| waterfall?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > Even if 80% of the population are eaten (by the spiders), it's
| worth it for the 20% to keep surviving and reproducing.
|
| Some symbiosis
|
| Float away from the methane and die, or if lucky attach to a
| predator that lives in the methane that will harvest you for
| consumption but not before you reproduce
| leptons wrote:
| _"Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider
| grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria
| for nutrition,"_
|
| I don't of anyone in history that had chicken eggs growing on
| their skin.
| 9dev wrote:
| Yeah, that phrase sounds like it was written by an alien not
| particularly familiar with eating habits on Earth...
| dotancohen wrote:
| Nobody specified that these were _chicken_ eggs. Though that
| thought leads me in two different directions, neither of which
| is fit for polite company.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-23 23:00 UTC)