From redOrbit:
First Animals To Live Without Oxygen Discovered
Posted on: Wednesday, 7 April 2010, 08:49 CDT
Deep under the Mediterranean Sea small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by ‘poisonous’ sulphides. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen.
Roberto Danovaro, from the Polytechnic University of Marche, Ancona, Italy, worked with a team of researchers to retrieve sediment samples from a deep hypersaline anoxic basin (DHABs) of the Mediterranean Sea and studied them for signs of life. “These extreme environments”, said Danovaro, “have been thought to be exclusively inhabited by viruses, Bacteria and Archaea. The bodies of multicellular animals have previously been discovered, but were thought to have sunk there from upper, oxygenated, waters. Our results indicate that the animals we recovered were alive. Some, in fact, also contained eggs”. Electronmicroscopy shows that instead of aerobic mitochondria, these animals possess organelles resembling the hydrogenosomes found previously in unicellular organisms (protozoans) that inhabit anaerobic environments.
The implications of this finding may reach far beyond the darker parts of the Mediterranean Sea floor, according to Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In one of two commentaries accompanying this piece of research, she said, “The finding by Danovaro et al. offers the tantalizing promise of metazoan life in other anoxic settings, for example in the subsurface ocean beneath hydrothermal vents or subduction zones or in other anoxic basins”.
Evolution Surprise: Bacteria Have “Noses,” Can Smell: here.
Microbes found thriving in porous rock deep beneath the seafloor: here.
New species discovered around Caribbean deep sea thermal vents: here.
Scientists have discovered a strange and rare hybrid site in the deep sea where two extreme seafloor environments exist side by side, and are home to a parade of weird hybrid creatures seemingly adapted to the hardships posed by both intense environments. Researchers discovered hydrothermal vents and cold methane seeps in a swath of the the deep sea off Costa Rica in 2010, and found a host of unknown species living there: here.
A new study, “Global Dispersion and Local Diversification of the Methane Seep Microbiome,” provides evidence methane seeps are habitats that harbor distinct microbial communities unique from other seafloor ecosystems. The article appeared in the March 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): here.
Across the globe, the diversity of plant and animal species generally increases from the North and South Poles towards the Equator but surprisingly that rule isn’t true for soil bacteria, according to a new study by Queen’s University biology professor Paul Grogan: here.
Archaea As Food Source Adds New Twist To Understanding Greenhouse Gas Cycles: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Study identifies relatives of microbe that
became part of us:
Mitochondria — the energy-generating compartments
of our cells — are thought to be descendants of
free-living bacteria.
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/110726_mitochondria
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A team led by USC microbiologist Katrina Edwards found that the microbes that thrive on hot fluid methane and sulfur spewed by active hydrothermal vents are supplanted, once the vents go cold, by microbes that feed on the solid iron and sulfur that make up the vents themselves.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/uosc-ldo012412.php
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