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Could you have leviathan sized animals with no phytoplankton? Seems like thermal vents would provide a lot less energy than the Sun, but I’m really out of my de
by yakz 3y ago
Could you have leviathan sized animals with no phytoplankton? Seems like thermal vents would provide a lot less energy than the Sun, but I’m really out of my depth.
- lisper 3y ago> Could you have leviathan sized animals with no phytoplankton? Yes. See e.g.: https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/how-giant-tube-worms-survive-hydrothermal-vents https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/how-giant... These aren't "leviathan-sized" but they could easily provide food for something that big. The base of this food chain would be chemosynthetic bacteria. After that, energy is not the limiting factor on size.
- andrewflnr 3y agoBroadly, yes, but chemosynthetic organisms tend to be benthic (afaict, IANA marine microbiologist), so they can stay close to their food source. So something big that feeds on them would probably be a grazer more than a swimmer. Unless, perhaps, they need to swim between vent sites or something...
- andrewflnr 3y agoSo I asked my friend who knows things about marine microbiology and she was actually pretty optimistic about free floating chemoautotrophs as the base of a food web. You just need enough chemicals dissolved in the water (which I guess is how they grow them in the lab). Some other ideas we discussed were bacteria growing on suspended particles and as endosymbiotes in larger animals like the aforementioned tube worms. So yeah, leviathans are on the table.