Scientists announced Tuesday that they have discovered a mysterious single-celled organism living nearly six miles below the surface of the ocean.
In the Mariana Trench, the planet’s deepest part of the ocean, scientists said they have discovered giant amoebas that have adapted to the most extreme of conditions.
The creatures are called xenophyophores, and scientists from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at University of California San Diego discovered them in the cold, pressurized depths 6.6 miles beneath the ocean surface.
“They are fascinating giants that are highly adapted to extreme conditions but at the same time are very fragile and poorly studied,” said Lisa Levin, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation.
“The identification of these gigantic cells in one of the deepest marine environments on the planet opens up a whole new habitat for further study of biodiversity, biotechnological potential and extreme environment adaptation,” said Doug Bartlett, the Scripps marine microbiologist and organizer of the expedition.
The team documented the deepest known existence of xenophyophores, single-celled animals exclusively found in deep-sea environments. The organism are known for their size, with individual cells often exceeding 4 inches, their extreme abundance on the seafloor and their role as hosts for a variety of organisms. Recent studies suggest that by trapping particles from the water, xenophyophores can concentrate high levels of lead, uranium and mercury, which means they are likely resistant to massive amounts of heavy metal.
The research team was able to capture images of the organisms by wrapping high-resolution cameras in a thick-walled glass sphere. The scientists then dropped the cameras, which are capable of withstanding the extreme pressure, to a depth of 6.6 miles.
