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Vent Life Cycle
There are still many mysteries connected with vents. For example, researchers do not know the life span of vents or understand the evolution of the vent biocommunity.
How are vents colonized?
They are puzzled by vent organism dispersal and colonization. How do creatures find a new vent, and how do they survive their journey to it across many miles of hostile sea? How can we explain the similarities as well as differences in widely separated vents? Why, for example, are giant tube worms found only in the Pacific, while shrimp dominate vents in the Atlantic? Theories abound.
Some scientists theorize that propagules, or would-be colonizers, drift passively in ocean currents from vent to vent. Oceanographers Peter Jumars and Craig Smith of the University of Washington have suggested that vent propagules use whale carcasses on the ocean floor as hospitable way stations on their journey.
Others call this method of dispersal "the lucky larvae" theory. They consider it too haphazard to explain the rapid colonization scientists have observed at new vents. They propose other methods.
A group led by G.H. Renninger of the University of Guelph, Canada, reports evidence of eyeless shrimp's ability in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to detect hydrogen sulfide, the signature chemical of hydrothermal vents. This group believes such shrimp could "follow their sensors" to new sites.
Marine biologist Verena Tunnicliffe of the University of Victoria in British Columbia and geologist Mary Fowler of Royal Holloway, University of London, have another theory. They believe that vent communities that are now separated were once part of the same ridge. Propagules simply traveled up and down the ridge valley highways long ago, settling in new locations. Seafloor spreading over time separated these ridges and the seeded vent communities that were on them.
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