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I enjoyed your story of the great snail chase. It sounds like you could use a good watchdog. I chose hydrothermal vents as a topic for my biology class essay paper and couldnt believe my luck when I found your expedition had just gotten under way. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t check on your progress. This is the most enjoyable site I have ever found on the web and I thank you all for the time you put into sharing your experiences with the world.

Knowing you have so many scientists and researchers on board, I got to wondering how, or if, you all have time to sit down as a group for brainstorming sessions, or do you all come together at the completion of the trip and tie all your thoughts together?

Also, I have heard many people talk about vents being the location of the start of life. Are there any on board with these thoughts and if so, what have you found here or at any other location to make you feel this is the case?

Thank you once again for the great site,
Steve Judkins
Walden, Vermont

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the great questions! You’re right, there are many scientists on board and we actually do get to sit down and talk to each other about our findings and thoughts on various subjects. Because the science party is so multi-disciplinary, we all learn a great deal from each other. It’s a great experience!

Because I’m a biologist, I’ll first answer your question with an animal bias. Although it makes sense that vents would be a plausible refugia from the forces (perhaps meteors) that are presumed to have caused the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions, many scientists don’t believe vents to be the origin of life from an animal perspective for several reasons:

1) Vent animals are thought now to have evolved from shallow living relatives (such as those found at cold seeps along the continental margins and other low oxygen, reducing environments). Evolutionary scenarios can actually be tested these days by using the nucleotide sequences from a number of genes that are conserved among animals, such as the cytochrome oxidase gene of the mitochondria. By sequencing this gene from a number of organisms, scientists have determined, at least in the case of bivalves and tubeworms, that the evolution of these groups has progressed from shallow water to the deep sea (although this has certainly not been shown for all vent animal groups).

2) In addition, along the same lines, scientists have also found molecular evidence that some vent animals (shrimp, bivalves, and tubeworms) are relatively young evolutionary groups and that the radiation of these species is recent (less than 100 million years ago). This is not consistent with the origin of life, or even with these groups being ancestral for that matter. For the microbes, however, it is a different story. They are functionally very similar to those suspected to live on early Earth and are considered to be very ancient. I think the question of whether vent microbes could be the origin of life (3-4 billion years ago), is still unanswered, but there are many microbiologists studying these interesting microbes to find an answer to your question. Perhaps we will know in the near future.

Thanks for the great question and keep checking on the website for our next adventures. And, most importantly, keep encouraging those young minds to pursue biology as a career. It can be so much fun!

Take care,
Shana Goffredi

Since you are updating Jason, what updates besides it being able to lift more weight and having an additional arm will be on Jason II.

Thank you!
Marie Miller

Hi Marie,

That is a good question. The main purpose for an upgrade to Jason II is to make the vehicle more capable for scientific sampling. When the existing Jason was designed and built over 10 years ago, we had planned for the vehicle to take some of the submersible Alvin’s jobs that took a long time to accomplish. A good example of this type of work is mapping a hydrothermal vent field. It takes lots of time to do this and rather than have three people cooped up in Alvin, we can use Jason. Jason can stay down doing these jobs much longer than Alvin because there are no people inside and all Jason’s power is supplied from the ship (Alvin operates on batteries).

Although these types of jobs are good for ROVs like Jason, we have found that more and more scientists wish to take lots of samples or deploy big instruments. The present Jason is not very good at these kinds of jobs so we are doing an update to fix that. As you point out, the new Jason will have two manipulators. These will be both more powerful and more dexterous. Jason II will have more payload (be able to lift more) and have a bigger space to carry things like mussel pots, crab traps or water samplers. In addition, Jason II will have bigger thruster motors so we can go faster and lift heavier objects such as rocks.

Other changes to the new Jason won’t be so obvious. There will be more television cameras and more up-to-date electronics. Some parts of the existing Jason are getting pretty hard to find any more so we want to make some changes to make Jason more modern.

Andy Bowen