were thriving in an environment scientists were convinced was uninhabitable. The remarkable discovery took the scientific world by storm and raised more questions than it answered. As Holger Jannasch, a geologist for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said:
The serendipitous discovery of vent life raised many puzzling questions, perhaps the most perplexing of which was, what were these animals living on? Most living things get their energy from sunlight. But what source of energy here in the deep, dark depths of the sea? Figuring out what the giant tubeworms lived on was especially mystifying because they had no mouths, guts or anuses (Meadows, 1996, 2).
The scientists eventually discovered that the energy source is provided by a number of bacteria through the process of chemosynthesis. The ability to live in the vents by all animals that call it home is directly dependent on the existence of bacteria and the process of chemosynthesis. Without the bacteria and chemosynthesis, none of the life forms of the vents would b
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