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Working Group Updates
Vent Ecology
Chairs - S. Hourdez (Sta. Biol. Roscoff, France) and C. Fisher (Penn. State Univ., USA)
Members
The Vent Ecology WG was officially created in 2008. It comprises
members from 11 different countries and is chaired by
Stéphane Hourdez (France) and Charles Fisher (USA). As proposed
when the WG formed, C. Fisher will rotate off as cochair
at the end of 2008, but will stay on as a WG member. We
will select a new co-chair from the current WG members.
Recent and upcoming meetings
- The International Conference of Comparative Physiology and
Biochemistry (Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya, 19-25
July 2008) had a special session organized by C. Fisher on
Life in Extreme Environments of the Deep-Sea. The session
included presentations by 6 IR biologists from Austria,
France, and the USA.
- A ChEss workshop, “Phylogeny and taxonomy of vesicomyid
and mytilid bivalves," was held in Roscoff, France, 5-10 September
2008. The workshop was co-organized by S. Hourdez
and Heiko Sahling and attended by numerous IR biologists.
- A similar ChEss workshop was held in Hawaii from 28-31
October 2008: "Siboglinidae: a model system for the understanding
of evolution, adaptive radiation, microbial symbioses
and ecology at extreme environments." The organizers
were Adrian Glover, Ana Hilario & Thomas Dahlgren.
- Two back-to-back CAREX (Life in Extreme Environments)
workshops will be held in San Feliu de Guixols, Spain, from
29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2008. S. Hourdez will participate in both
workshops (“Priorities for environment-specific technological
developments and infrastructures” and "Identification of
model ecosystems in extreme environments").
- The ASLO Meeting (25-30 January 2009, Nice, France) will
have a topical session on "Life in extreme environments:
deep-sea chemosynthetic ecosystems" organized by François
Lallier (France) and C. Fisher (USA).
- The 4 th International Symposium on Chemosynthesis-Based
Ecosystems - Hydrothermal Vents, Seeps and Other Reducing
Habitats will be held June 29 - July 3, 2009, in Okinawa,
Japan. Yoshihiro Fujiwara and Yoshiko Takeoka are organizing
this meeting and can be contacted at 4th_CBE_office@
jamstec.go.jp. The early registration deadline is 31 January
2009. The Vent Ecology WG will meet during this meeting,
and IR has agreed to provide some support both for the WG
and for the CBE meeting. We will request additional support
from national programs for travel to Japan for IR researchers
to attend the meeting.
Mineral mining policy and activity
One of the goals of IR is to encourage the protection and management
of the oceanic ridge environment. C. Fisher has been
invited and will provide input to Nautilus Minerals during the
Nautilus Minerals Environmental Review on November 17,
2008, in Memphis, Tennessee, regarding best practices in mining
at back-arc basins. He will also give a presentation, titled
“Physiological ecology and biodiversity of animal life around
hydrothermal vents and hydrocarbon seeps,” to the Underwater
Mining Institute meeting on “Marine Minerals: Technological
Solutions and Environmental Challenges” in Oxford,
Mississippi, on November 19, 2008. An upcoming ICES (International
Council for the Exploration of the Sea) symposium
on issues confronting the deep oceans will be held in the
Azores from 26-30 April 2009 (http://www.ices.dk/iceswork/
symposia/2007.3.ACE06.pdf). This symposium and a preceding
event on 2 April 2009 sponsored by WHOI, InterRidge,
and ChEss (“Deep-Sea Mining of Seafloor Massive Sulfides: A
Reality for Science and Society in the 21 st Century”), will be
attended by some members of the Vent Ecology WG.
Online resources
Our WG aims at encouraging cutting edge collaborations
among researchers in the field. For this, IR will assist in setting
up two online resources for the WG and other interested vent
ecologists:
- The first, which will be available through our WG webpage
on the IR website, will provide information on completed,
on-going, and planned projects that use high throughput
molecular approaches to better characterize the physiological
and ecological potential and realized activities of vent biota
(such as genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics). These
approaches are costly, and to best utilize our international
community’s resources, analyses should probably not be duplicated
but rather planned to complement one another.
- The second resource will provide a venue for vent ecologists to
provide information on the availability of biological samples
from previous or planned cruises, and as well as for others to
place requests for valuable samples. This will be coordinated
with the CoML ChEss (and OBIS) efforts, which at this time
do not yet include frozen samples. The WG will continue to
work closely with ChEss and the CoML with respect to integration
of biological studies across the world and compiling
searchable inventories of samples.
InterRidge News 49 Vol. 17, 2008