http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050...seniceater.html

Lake Microbe Eats Arsenic for Breakfast



June 1, 2005— A new strain of "extremophile" microbe has been discovered making a living off a poison in an otherwise dead, dry, salt lake in the Mojave Desert.

The bacterium, called SLAS-1, gets energy from a chemical reaction with arsenic — one of many deadly chemicals in the barren, salty expanse of Searles Lake, southwest of Death Valley in California.

The SLAS-1 discovery, reported in the current issue of Science, provides a glimmer of hope that someday microbes may be able to help treat arsenic-contaminated drinking water — a major problem worldwide.

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"Obviously we can't use these organisms to remediate (arsenic-contaminated) drinking water," said Ronald Oremland of the U.S. Geological Survey. SLAS-1 can't survive in freshwater, he explained. "But it does give insight into what other organisms might be capable of."

SLAS-1 was found in the extremely salty arsenic-rich slurry that lies underneath the salt pan of Searles Lake. The mud was thought to be sterile, until Oremland and his colleagues decided to check the mud out — just in case.

"We were very surprised by that because we expected these (muds) to be as dead as a post," said Oremland.

SLAS-1 may constitute a new bacteria species, if not an entirely new genus. But what's particularly intriguing about SLAS-1, say researchers, is that the bacterium seems to require little other than arsenic to sustain itself.

"This cycle can persist without the input of organic material," the University of Groningen's Paul van der Wielen, who studies microbes that live in extremely briny deep sea waters.

The Searles Lake discovery turns upside-down previous beliefs about such chemically hostile environments.

It was long thought that arsenic, toxic compounds in such hypersaline conditions were "anathema to life," said van der Wielen.

In fact, biologists searching for extreme life-forms have had a tendency to search for sulfate-reducing bacteria or methane-making bugs, overlooking the possibility of arsenic-eaters, van der Wielen said.

But under extremely salty conditions, it may be that only the arsenic-eaters can make it. That has implications for life elsewhere in the solar system.

"Such brine lakes are present or have been present on Mars or Jupiter's moon Europa," said van der Wielen. "It is also known that the brine lakes on these extraterrestrial objects contain arsenic compounds. So this widens the picture of the possibility of extraterrestrial life."

There's colonies of weird worms just off the coast here, near the fulcrum (I think that's what they are called) vents in the ocean - cracks into the mantle where nasty chemical steam is released....they thrive on the nasty stuff.

One man's trash is another man's treasure!

Then, there's those monkey-people...you remember those - right next to the antfarms?