Attack of the Deep-Sea Bone Eaters

For those of you who missed the Science article in July of 2004, Osedax (latin for bone devourer) is bone-devouring (obviously) group of marine worms. Honestly, I don't make this stuff up. They have no eyes, no mouths, no legs, and no stomach. Instead they have a root that invades the bones of dead whales on the ocean floor. They rely on a symbiosis with the bacterial group Oceanospirillales, known for heterotrophic degradation of complex organic compounds. The large visible organisms are all females with males being parasitic, often in high densities, and living inside the females. These organisms were discovered living on the carcass of a grey whale at 2891 m depth in Monterey Canyon, off the coast of California. Goffredi notes that "Measures of significant population sizes, and the discovery of four additional host species in only three years, suggests that the Osedax worms and their bacterial 'partners' are likely to play substantial roles in the cycling of nutrients into the surrounding deep-sea community." This can be put into context by considering that the Osedax worms and their symbiotic bacteria can turn-over a large amount of organic carbon (one whale carcass may weigh up to 50 tons), approximately 2000 years faster than the usual mechanism of carbon deposition to the deep seafloor.
You can read more about the symbiosis here in a new paper in Environmental Microbiology by Shana Goffredi and colleagues