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A Dip in the Pool

September 23, 2011

Researchers gather samples of mud from a blue pool near the edge of Shark Bay, Australia. Blue pools are small bodies of water that are much more salty than seawater. Below a few feet deep, they lack oxygen, and the water and sediments in them have a high concentration of sulfides, which are toxic for most organisms (and which give the pools a rotten-egg smell). Geobiologist Joan Bernhard (second from left) and biologist Virginia Edgcomb (third from left) of WHOI, with Roger Summons (in water) of MIT and other co-workers, were looking for novel eukaryotes—species new to science—living in this very strange habitat. Join us Nov. 22 , when Edgcomb and Bernhard lead a Dive & Discover cruise to look for eukaryotes in another extreme habitat, the Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basins of the Mediterranean Sea.(Photo by Anna McIntyre-Wressnig, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)