Christian Levesque from Montreal, another Master's student out here with me, is trying to figure out how the 'sulfide worm' manages to share the same habitat with another similar worm called the 'palm worm'. The 'palm worm' got its name from the way that it looks like a palm tree when waves its gills in the water currents. Another one of my favorite areas of research is to look at how microbes interact with minerals. Hydrothermal vents are very important areas for the formation of mineral deposits. Out here at Axial Volcano I am trying to understand how 'iron bacteria' help form coatings of 'rusty fluff' of iron oxide that we are seeing everywhere on the new lavas from last winter's eruption.
Iron bacteria create energy for growth by transforming dissolved iron into rust.
The rust or iron oxide mixes with bacterial slime to form a coating on the outside of their cells. I started studying iron bugs back in 1988, working with a French colleague on fossil bacteria in rocks called cherts which are very rich in iron oxide. These rocks came from mines in Cypress and the Phillipines and California where sulfide ores formed at hot vents on the floor of ancient oceans are being extracted for metals such as copper, lead, zinc and silver. That project got me interested in iron bacteria but I could never find a place in today's ocean to do more work on the subject. We scooped up samples to analyze and used video to map where the mats were found on the seafloor.