charismaticmicrofauna

“Truth be told, the planets most victorious organisms have always been microscopic. In all the encounters between Davids and Goliaths, was there ever a time when a Goliath won?”  ~Leon Trotsky Trout, Galapagos –Kurt Vonnegut

Welcome to my blogsite. I am a first year grad student at the University of South Florida. I am very excited about my new adventures studying the deep ocean as I hope you are too. I invite you to join me as I explore the fantastic and victorious world of microorganisms. Bacteria are the keys to our medical and environmental future, our interstellar present, and our evolutionary past.  I hope that you will find as much passion for these teeny-tiny bio-dominating organisms as I have in my studies and research.

My research focuses on microbes that live inside giant tube worm trophosomes that live around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean floor. At the depths that these organisms live along with bivalves, shrimp, and crabs (among other things that have yet to be studied) there is a minimal amount of sunlight, oxygen, and other chemicals that we need on land to survive let alone as mammals. In addition to the lack of what we would know as essential to our existence there are levels of other chemicals and metals that would be deadly to us feeble land organisms. How do they survive? What has made them so resilient?

Before there was oxygen in our environment to motivate the cells in our body to live, there were other toxic gases like methane and sulfide. As humans, we can smell these chemicals in very small concentrations in the air because they are so lethal to our bodies that we have adapted the ability to know the smell of danger. The combination of gases that existed in our prehistoric atmosphere and oceans still exists on our planet. The modern microbes that live there have possibly existed from very early in our planet’s history 6000 years ago! Just joking, everybody knows that Noah took two of everything on the ark except for microbes, so that means modern microbes are much younger than the planet.

I digress; the study of microbes is significant for many reasons with evolution and astrobiology being two of the amazing subjects which are of significant interest to me. My dream is to show you a world of wonder and mystery that exists on your fingertips, in your stomach, on toxic substances, in your medicine cabinet, but mostly in the environment and from my personal perspective in the oceans.

I hope that you’ll join me through the natural world, evolutionary history, academia, and to the seas!