A worm that lives at hydrothermal vents a kilometer under the seasurface tolerates high levels of arsenic and sulfur by turning them into the bright yellow pigment orpiment.
‘It’s not easy being green’, Kermit the Frog once sang melancholily. The worm Paralvinella hessleri could sing the same thing about yellow. In the hottest part of hydrothermal vents off the coast of Japan, these creatures have a lot of stress factors to deal with: heat, pressure and high levels of arsenic and sulfur. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Oceanology discovered that the worm has a system to biomineralise the arsenic from its skin cells with sulfur from the vents, as they presented in PLOS Biology. This results in orpiment (As2S3), a pigment once loved by painters for its bright yellow hue. Though it fell into disregard because of its toxicity, P. hessleri continues to paint the deep sea bright yellow.
Wang, H. et al. (2025) PLOS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003291
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