Scientists discover life teeming in deep ocean

“Due to some farming households having a weak recognition of the law, bad habits and lack of supervision and capability for treatment have led to this situation,” national agriculture ministry chief veterinarian Yu Kangzhen said.

Yu had attributed a higher mortality rate among pigs to colder weather this spring, but had ruled out an epidemic, the ministry said in statement posted on its website.

The thousands of dead pigs have drawn attention to China’s poorly regulated farm production. Animals that die from disease can end up in the country’s food-supply chain or be improperly disposed of, despite laws against this.

Authorities in Wenling, also in Zhejiang, announced last week that 46 people had been jailed for up to six years for processing and selling pork from diseased pigs.

China faced one its biggest food-safety scandals in 2008, when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making 300,000 people ill.

In another recent incident, the fast-food giant KFC faced controversy after revealing that some Chinese suppliers provided chicken with high levels of antibiotics, in what appeared to be an industrywide practice. SCIENTISTS said on Sunday they had discovered an unexpectedly large and active community of single-cell organisms living on the Pacific sea floor at the deepest site on Earth.

The “surprisingly active” community of microbes exists 11 kilometres below sea level in the Mariana Trench, one of the world’s most inaccessible places, 325 kilometres southwest of the Pacific island of Guam.

Surprisingly, researchers found the trench housed almost 10 times more bacteria than a nearby six-kilometredeep site, living on organic waste from dead sea animals, algae and other microbes that settle on the ocean floor.

Many scientists had thought that the deeper the floor below sea level, the more deprived it would be of food — which has to float all the way from the oxygen-rich surface to the bottom of the ocean.

In fact, the team found the Mariana Trench was rich in organic matter.

“Their analysis document that a highly active bacteria community exists in the sediment of the trench, even though the environment is under extreme pressure — almost 1,100 times higher than at sea level,” a press statement said.

The Mariana Trench made headlines a year ago when Hollywood director James Cameron made history’s first solo trip by submarine to the bottom of the trench.

He described a “desolate” and “alien” environment.

Because of its extreme depth, the Mariana Trench is cloaked in perpetual darkness, with temperatures just a few degrees above freezing.

The water pressure at the bottom is a crushing eight tonnes per square inch – about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level.

Before Cameron, the trench had been visited only once before, and briefly, by a twoman crew in 1960.

For the latest study, an international research team used a specially designed underwater robot with ultrathin sensors to probe the sea bed for oxygen consumption in a 2010 expedition.

Scientists cannot remove samples to study in a laboratory, as many of the microorganisms adapted to life in these extreme conditions will die from changes in temperature and pressure.

The team also made videos of the bottom of the trench and confirmed there were very few large animals at these depths.

“Rather, we found a world dominated by microbes that are adapted to function effectively at conditions highly inhospitable to most higher organisms,” team leader Ronnie Glud, from the University of Southern Denmark’s Nordic Centre for Earth Evolution, said.

The Mariana Trench is a crescent-shaped scar in the Earth’s crust, more than 2,500 kilometres long and 69 kilometres wide on average.