5 Comments

Tal­mu­dic Ques­tion #102

Sup­pose you're a ses­sile ma­rine crea­ture look­ing to put down "roots" some place. Would you choose to at­tach to a liv­ing or­gan­ism or to some­thing dead or inan­i­mate?

 

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bks
12 years ago

By anal­ogy to plants on land, I'll go with "dead and inan­i­mate" but af­ter read­ing _Small Things Considered_ for some years, I'm not sure that any ma­rine niche is all that dead from the the Weltan­schau­ung of a bar­na­cle.
–bks

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Hollis
12 years ago

I would choose a ses­sile liv­ing or­gan­ism and feed off its by-prod­ucts.

0
Jonathan Badger
12 years ago

Con­tin­u­ing with bks' com­ment, when I was work­ing on the genome of the bac­terium Hy­phomonas ne­tu­nium (which be­comes ses­sile af­ter at­tach­ing to a gen­er­ally in­or­ganic sur­face in or­der to spawn its motile "daugh­ter cells"), I learned from the lit­er­a­ture than oys­ter lar­vae prefer­ably at­tach to a sur­face al­ready col­o­nized by Hy­phomonas or re­lated bac­te­ria.
Elio replies:
Thanks for shar­ing this lovely vi­gnette. An­other fine ex­am­ple of the va­ri­ety of mi­cro­bial ex­pe­ri­ences.

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Shaun Brinsmade
12 years ago

I think it de­pends. A liv­ing or­gan­ism is likely to have a con­sor­tium of es­tab­lished co-in­hab­i­tants. There­fore, un­less I have a unique abil­ity, I might be out-com­peted. How­ever, a life­less lump of rock is not very ap­peal­ing — might be harder to "make a meta­bolic liv­ing" un­less I can "eat" that rock and also grab what floats by.

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Marco
12 years ago

De­pends on what type of ma­rine en­vi­ron­ment the or­gan­ism is deal­ing with. In eu­trophic en­vi­ron­ment with high nu­tri­ents at­tach­ing to a sta­tion­ary el­e­ment would work be­cause nu­tri­ents are plen­ti­ful and sim­ple dif­fu­sion will bring nu­tri­ents. In an olig­otrophic en­vi­ron­ment at­tach­ing to a mo­bile el­e­ment such as an an­i­mal would make more sense be­cause the larger or­gan­ism will move to­wards food which in turn brings the at­tached or­gan­ism food.

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