Bad news comes today from the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling site continues to spew crude oil unchecked in spite of BP’s new cap. That’s because of growing concerns that the disaster has triggered areas of instability beneath the sea floor that could burst outward in new ruptures if pressure is suddenly restored to the system by the closure of the cap. So, scans are being conducted, and in the meantime, the pollution grows.
A new kind of victim of the oil spill has been found as well: Pyrosomes, floating dead in large numbers on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
If you don’t know what a pyrosome is, don’t feel bad. I’d never heard of them myself, before this morning. What I’ve discovered suggests that they’re both aesthetically and ecologically remarkable.
Pyrosomes are chordates, like us, though they don’t look like any vertebrate. Larval pyrosomes have a nerve cord running down their backs, suggesting a common ancestry with all vertebrates in a long distant past.
Pyrosomes are small, individually, but when pyrosomes grow up, they don’t live alone. They join together into colonies, fused together into tube-like structures, with a gelatinous glue holding the individuals together, throbbing in collective rhythm to move the mass forward.
They’re pretty too. Pyrosomes are bioluminescent, meaning that the produce their own light. They glow in the dark.
The pyrosome you see here, photographed by Nick Hobgood, is small, but pyrosome colonies grow larger than human beings. Some sources say that they grow much larger, several feet in circumference and between 12 and 50 feet long.
Pyrosomes also play a fundamental role in the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. They’re eaten by a wide range of animals, which are then in turn eaten by other animals. If the pyrosomes of the Gulf of Mexico are being killed en masse by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a major food source is being removed from our nation’s coastal waters, and the marine food web of the region may come undone.
Just the reason i predicted ultimate doom for humanity (yeah, it’ll take a while – watch as it unfolds in our lifetime): complete disruption of the food chain from multiple sources. Here’s another little piece of evidence. Now let’s keep adding to the list as the collapse happens – little stuff like this and plankton (who also don’t eat crude oil and can’t live in it), all the way up the sea-food chain to fish that humans eat not being able to survive on nothing. Then, later, as the oil rain starts hitting the nation’s breadbasket and the crops start dying – what are we supposed to do for grain? What are the cattle supposed to eat when the grasses start becoming infused with this toxic stuff?
We haven’t even factored in the erratic weather yet! Tough to grow stuff in hurricane and tornado season. Crops can’t grow when it’s too hot or way too dry (or far too wet either). Even trees are under stress from the heat and drought. Water sources dry up. Bugs proliferate. Necessary insects like bees are crashing, leaving us without our main pollinators. The topsoil is depleting, running off, and the natural nutrients in it are bleaching out from chemical farming over-use.
Then there’ll come a time when oil becomes scarce, and we aren’t preparing for that either.
i could go on, but i’m feeling sick suddenly just thinking about this complete mess we’re in. i gotta go out in my garden (while i still can). We’ll chat some more, later.
Pyrosomes also eat algea that absorb carbon dioxide. An average sized swarm of pyrosomes absorbs more than 4.000.000 kg carbon dioxide during one night. (Wiki)
They could help reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere! What to do without pyrosomes…