The bizarre beasts living in Romania's poison cave (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The bizarre beasts living in Romania's poison cave (2015)

bbc.co.uk

212 pointsEndXA38 comments

The BBC site wasn't working for me either, found this one which has incredible pictures:

https://geoera.eu/blog/movile-cave-romania/

I guess since (most of?) the creatures don't have eyes, it's easy to photograph them? Looks like the place of nightmares.

The water scorpion there particularly interests me. In the rest of the world, those are active, sight-oriented predators, and the one in this cave still seems to have large eyes.

Water currents enter and exit from caves. Aquatic fauna do the same and Nepa can fly easily or enter in crevices if it senses water. That said, the species shown are strange for Europe. I wouldn't discard that there are some misplaced photos (or the authors toke some literary licenses).

I found a documentary

https://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/pl...

Wow, they're just going right on in there and submerging themselves in that bacterial soup.

Scientists are definitely a unique breed.

The bacteria are in an environment very different than the human body. So while there may be a lot of bacteria, it's probably not going to do any harm to you because it's not adapted to infect you.

Speaking as someone who has done a decent amount of caving, I'd be much more worried about the CO2 and other gasses in the air (and I'm sure those scientists are as well). It's really rare for caves to have dangerous bad air. But sounds like this one could be an exception.

Hydrogen Sulfide is bad stuff. Friend did work for a tannery. One night the concrete lined cesspool they stored waste from leather manufacturing blurbled and turned over releasing CO2, Methane and Hydrogen sulfide. Killed two security guards in their guard shack 100 yards away.

I think like cyanide you lose your sense of smell as the concentration approaches lethal levels. That leads people to assume concentrations are falling instead of increasing.

Photo a) Cave inhabitant is an interesting surprise and really bizarre, an antique branch of arachnida. Maybe a new relict species (would be the third in Europe).

Totally harmless to humans and a real creature. Harry Potter's fans may remember it from the third film.

Hum... that photo does not fit really there...

This also reminds me of Cuatro Ciénegas Basin in Mexico. It is studied because its life forms are directly connected to the Oxygenation period our Earth went through. Below the surface, there are a lot of creatures that cannot exist anywhere else (that we know of) on Earth, and that thrive in this environment that would kill just about any other life form. They are considered some of the most primitive oligotrophic life we know of still around today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuatro_Ci%C3%A9negas#Cuatro_Ci...

This almost sounds like a naturally occurring poison jar, except there isn’t one survivor left, but a whole entire separate ecosystem forming a food pyramid rebased on top of autotrophs.

Which is to say, this is really damn cool.

Ian Malcolm "Life will find a way"

At least at that place. Imagine all the other places which perished due to various reasons. A numbers game.

What do you mean by "poison jar"? Google isn't turning anything up for me (besides this thread).

I think they might mean the creation process for Gu [1], which apparently involves sealing several venomous creatures in a jar together and then extracting poison from the last survivor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu_(poison)

Gu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu_(poison)

I’ve seen it translated as poison jar so that was where my mind turned to first.

> "The level of oxygen is only a third to half of the concentration found in open air (7–10% O2 in the cave atmosphere, compared to 21% O2 in air), and about one hundred times more carbon dioxide (2–3.5% CO2 in the cave atmosphere, versus 0.04% CO2 in air). It also contains 1–2% methane (CH4) and both the air and waters of the cave contain high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and ammonia (NH3).[2]" - wiki

- At least we know who will take over planet if we screw up with Global Warming ...

>You must then climb down through narrow limestone tunnels coated in an ochre clay, in pitch darkness and temperatures of 25 °C.

A terrrifying 77 degrees fahrenheit?

I love articles/videos like this. Highly fascinating and just goes to show how much we still have to learn about our planet.

On a related note; see the "Planet Earth 1986 TV series" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(1986_TV_series) for a amazing and well-rounded view of Our Planet Earth. This was done back when Science programs were Scientific with no annoying hosts, dumbing down of narratives, cutesy-poo graphics and other distractions. I highly recommend watching this with your kids to instill a sense of wonder and sparking fruitful discussions.

Episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=planet+earth+pb...

PS: This is completely unrelated to "Planet Earth" produced by BBC and narrated by David Attenborough.

> "The pool of warm, sulphidic water stinks of rotting eggs or burnt rubber when you disturb it as hydrogen sulphide is given off."

... tight confined space, no direct access to the surface, creepy crawlies, toxic environment/atmosphere.

Story time combining all of these + more:

H₂S is a horrible thing to get in contact with. I was working for Oceaneering on a diving job just off the coast of China. Next to us a Chinese vessel with their diving crew that was trenching. They've been there long before us and sending divers down on nitrox or air and had them decompress in the chamber on their ship's deck (which alone was insane considering the depth). We noticed they had heavy helicopter traffic and rotated crew out on an unusual high frequency. Nobody on our crew knew what was going on over there nor that they had every diver returning "bent".

Our vessel was meant to do inspection and minor repairs on an oil well literally next to them and we had sent our own divers into the saturation chamber to start diving the next day. We had no warning from the Chinese crew anchored not far from us and who must have known shit is on fire considering they've been rotating out their sick divers every couple days. A few minutes into the job our diver returning from the lockout to the bell complained of headache and a foul smell. We brought the bell back up with our divers in it and docked them back onto the "Sat system". The moment the bell got lifted out of the water we noticed the rotten stench. Not only did both guys immediately faint the moment they made it back into the chamber but also the crew docking the bell back onto the system got sick (headaches lasted several days and puking their guts out). Our divers who were still inside the chambers needed to be decompressed which would last close to 4 days at that depth. Under normal emergency procedure a "Med" would be sent into the chamber to help them in case first-aid was needed. But given that the inside of these chambers now were contaminated with H2S we just had to hope that they don't die. We had to slow-down our normal speed of ascent laid out by the decompression table since even with normal procedure our guys were also starting to show symptoms of the bends on their way up. So instead of 4 days decompression time the guys suffered for a whole week before we could get them out and choppered to the hospital.

Both our guys survived but were severely ill for a long time. One was in a wheel chair for a few years and never fully recovered though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_diving

There is a location of this sort in pretty much every JRPG. It's fascinating to hear about one in real life.

It's the kind of place you can learn some good enemy skills.

It mentions temperatures of 25C as a hardship to endure. Is the author unfamiliar with celsius? Or from somewhere very chilly?

> "It's pretty warm, and very humid so it feels warmer than it is, and of course with a boiler suit and helmet on that doesn't help," says Boden

That's Dr Rich Boden who, as best I can tell, is a UK native and therefore probably not acclimatised to 25C even in summer wear, much less with a boiler suit on.

Didn't read about the suit, and in my head I was thinking normal hot and humid, like houston tx, but this must be right at 100% relative humidity. Course houston would be more like 45c.

There could be ecosystems like this deep underground on Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Titan, Ceres, or many other places in the solar system. I would not be at all surprised if we find such a place by the end of the 21st century. I hope to live to see it.

I recall hearing about this when it was first published. It fascinates me to no end that the more we learn about our own planet the less it seems we truly understand about the complexity and beauty that we are amongst.

“That’s a pair of them docks” - Bon Iver #paradox

The thing that fascinates me the most about this is that the isolated system remained viable over such a huge length of time. Every organism was molded by evolution to the conditions there. If it hadn't been discovered, it might have lasted for millions more years.

That stability is miraculous.

I love the ideas of the long now foundation, but I'm not sure 10,000 year thinking is enough.

How would our society need to evolve, for humanity to still be here in a million years?

I wonder if mammals might be lurking deeper, especially ones descended from apes, would be very interesting to see how evolution would have shaped them.

They don't even have reptiles. Pity.

(2015)

plenty of prior discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11682816

Some of these creatures remind of the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth

I wonder what the probability of finding a cave is if digging in a random spot. Pretty high, I would guess?

I get "The page isn’t redirecting properly" therefore:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161004233838/http://www.bbc.co...

It's working for me though it somehow doesn't seem to have a https version (even though www.bbc.co.uk itself does have one) which is a bit odd.

No https version, and I got a text-only page with a very small font, on which I had to click for the images. I guess it's a way of degrading somewhat gracefully...

I loved this article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com