Tiny organisms have been found living in oil - and eating it too

Scientists have found microorganisms living inside tiny water droplets suspended in oil, and they could one day help researchers clean up oil spills and find life on other planets.

Image: Rainer Meckenstock

It was previously assumed that microbial oil degradation only occurred at the interface of water and oil, but new research has found that microorganisms can also break down oil from the inside.

The study, carried out by an international team of researchers led by the Helmholtz Zentrum München research group in Germany, looked at the communities of microorganisms living inside water droplets on top of Pitch Lake, the world’s largest natural asphalt lake in Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.

Pitch Lake is a natural source of oil, which rises to the surface to form a hard crust, known as bitumen (the black stuff we use on our roads). While it might not sound like a very life-friendly habitat, the scientists found complex communities of active microbes in tiny samples of water about 1/50th the size of a regular drop of water - this is what they call a droplet.

”We saw a huge diversity of bacteria and archaea," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch from Washington State University's School of the Environment in a press release. "That's why we speak of an 'ecosystem,' because we have so much diversity in the water droplets."

The research, which has been published in Science, also found that microbes were actively breaking down the oil in the asphalt lake. This means that a similar phenomenon could one day be used to clean up oil spills or pollution in groundwater, which is something the scientists are now looking into in a follow-up project.

The study could also help oil companies avoid biodegradation in their reservoirs, and, perhaps most interestingly, it may help scientists find extraterrestrial life.

"For me, the cool thing is I got into it from an astrobiology viewpoint, as an analog to Saturn's moon, Titan, where we have hydrocarbon lakes on the surface," said Schulze-Makuch. 

He suggests that finding life in an environment as hostile as the 100-acre Pitch Lake increases the likelihood of life on Titan, as well as helping scientists understand how life can exist in such a harsh environment.

"We discovered that there are additional habitats where we have not looked at where life can occur and thrive," said Schulze-Makuch.