New Discovery: Blood-Red Worms That Thrive in a Toxic Cave (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO) | National Geographic
These worms are small. They're red, blood red, and they occur in well knots of worms—lots of worms together. Finding the worms in a place like sulfur cave shows that there are even places on Earth where creatures can live, where they are not connected to or dependent upon sunlight at all.
Sulfur cave is full of toxic gases. If you're going into sulfur cave, you can't go in there without self-contained breathing apparatus. It's just like a stinky, muddy, goopy hole in the ground, and deadly to humans and most other creatures. Yet, it's full of life. My initial reaction when I first saw the worms was, "Wow, there's really something living in this cave!" It immediately made me think they could be a new species that probably live nowhere else on the planet.
To keep these worms alive between the cave and the museum, my homemade method of oxygenating these worms is just to aerate them through this little straw. I just make sure I don't drink any by accident; the last thing I'd want to do would be to suck up a bunch of worms. If you go into a toxic cave, you don't expect anything exciting living there because it's supposed to be dead. Suddenly, you find worms that even look nice—well, as much as worms can look nice.
Some of the items we're researching with the worms include how and why their blood binds oxygen so well. There could be some potential medical benefits to that. Some other things we're researching with the worms include that they seem to have an unknown substance that reduces hydrogen sulfide, and this could potentially help with reducing hydrogen sulfide in our environment.
We always think, "Well, to have life on another planet, it has to be like Earth." This cave is certainly not like Earth. The worms in sulfur cave survive without sunlight because they're living on bacteria that get all their energy from the hot spring water that feeds the cave. This could be similar to what might go on on another planet, such as Mars.
Because on other planets, there could be underground caves that could easily harbor life similar to the sulfur cave worms. It's a nice—it's just a humongous amount of worms! Dave finds all sorts of exciting things. He just goes into places where normal people don't go and finds very exciting little worms. When you hear the beeps go off, it means you're in a very dangerous level of carbon dioxide, and you have to leave right away or you could go unconscious and die right there.