or lumière – whatever you call it, we all love a day full of

sunshine, and if you throw in a few warm gentle breezes, we’re set

to go. That light that we love so much is something that all life

on our planet needs to exist either directly or indirectly.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants use sunlight

into another compound called Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is

the fuel used by all living things. What most of us don’t know is

there is another way Mother Nature uses to make the fuel we need

place around deep ocean thermal vents on the ocean bottom. These

thermal vents are just like those on the sides of volcanoes only

they’re just cracks in the bottom, for the most part. The

distribution of the geothermal vents is worldwide. They’re found

where the tectonic plates the continents float on collide, like the

mid-Atlantic ridge, which runs from the Arctic Circle south until

process by which some species of bacteria help make this fuel by

chemical reactions inside their bodies. These bacteria live on or

near the bottom and use the chemicals coming out of the vents to

unique species of grazing animals like snails, slugs, worms and

filter feeders, like tubeworms, that feed off these bacteria, which

grow in great mats around the vents. There are some small and very

weird looking species of fish that feed on these invertebrates and

bacterial mats. An entirely new class of crabs was discovered.

Sometimes these bacteria live inside the bodies of animals around

the vents in a symbiotic relationship. These bacteria provide the

basis for all life around the vents. Without these bacteria, the

animal populations would be as sparse as the rest of the deep-sea

located in a relatively small area, the number of animals crowding

around these food sources is high. This is in sharp contrast to the

very sparse population of further away from the vents on the

abyssal plain. Outside of the vents food is supplied from material

that slowly drifts down from the ocean zones above that are exposed

single glimmer of sunlight from the moment they are born until the

"font-size: 16pt">Think Global – Act