Alternative lifestyle

摘要

A few years ago, as my bride and I sat finishing our wedding breakfast, I sipped my champagne, oblivious to what was sitting on the white linen-clad table in front of me. I certainly never imagined they would shape my research. Although we were getting married in the UK, my roots lie in the Bahamas. My wife had asked my parents to bring over shells to decorate the tables. Some of them caught the eye of my PhD supervisor, Crispin Little. "Nick, these are all lucinid shells," he said. I picked one up from the table in front of me. "Huh," I exclaimed, "so they are." Lucinid clams are unusual because they get part or all of their food from symbiotic bacteria living in their gills. What's really extraordinary, though, is how the bacteria get the energy they need to create this food: not from sunlight, as plants do, but from simple chemicals found in their surroundings - a process called chemosynthesis.