QUICK FACTS
Title: Paralvinella hessleri
The place it lives: Pacific Ocean
What it eats: Micro organism and natural particles round hydrothermal vents
Deep-sea creatures are uniquely tailored to dwelling in excessive environments, and the worm Paralvinella hessleri isn’t any exception. Actually, it survives excessive ranges of poisonous chemical compounds like arsenic by creating its personal poison.
Discovered solely on the hottest hydrothermal vents within the western Pacific, together with the Okinawa Trough and Mariana Again-Arc Basin, these worms develop as much as about 0.8 inches (22 millimeters) in size and dwell in protecting tubes connected to vent chimneys. Remarkably, P. hessleri is the one identified animal in a position to colonize and thrive within the acidic, metal-rich zones of those vents, the place temperatures can attain round 608 levels Fahrenheit (320 levels Celsius).
These worms have an uncommon survival trick that lets them face up to the excessive ranges of poisonous arsenic and sulfide discovered at hydrothermal vents. In people, arsenic publicity is linked to critical well being issues, together with most cancers and neurological issues. P. hessleri, nevertheless, turns this hazard right into a protection: it shops arsenic in its pores and skin cells, the place the toxin reacts with sulfide from vent fluids to kind orpiment — a much less dangerous, although nonetheless toxic, mineral.
This shiny yellow-orange substance, as soon as generally known as “King’s Yellow,” was traditionally utilized by artists as a pigment till its toxicity turned clear. P. hessleri, which has a yellow-orange tint because of the orpiment crystals, can accumulate a lot arsenic that it makes up practically 1% of the worm’s physique weight.
In a 2025 paper revealed within the journal PLOS Biology, the researchers who found the worms’ survival technique described the method as “combating poison with poison.”
Commenting on the invention, examine co-author Hao Wang, a researcher on the Chinese language Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oceanology, stated he was “surprised” when he first noticed the worms with a remotely operated automobile.
“The brilliant yellow Paralvinella hessleri worms had been in contrast to something I had ever seen, standing out vividly in opposition to the white biofilm and darkish hydrothermal vent panorama,” he stated in a press release. “It was exhausting to consider that any animal may survive, not to mention thrive, in such an excessive and poisonous surroundings.”
