New chlamydia species discovered deep under the Arctic Ocean.

They came across a number of diverse cousins of chlamydia between 0.1 and 9.4 meters below the seafloor, and found that the new species were closely related to the bacteria that cause infections in humans and other animals.

Bacteria ‘exceptionally abundant!’

While the authors didn’t find other host organisms that the new chlamydia-related bacteria depended on to survive, they said that the species could be getting fuel from other microorganisms deep in the ocean sediment. “Finding that Chlamydia have marine sediment relatives has given us new insights into how chlamydial pathogens evolved,” Dharamshi said. A team of international researchers made the discovery by collecting samples during a visit to Loki’s Castle, a field of hydrothermal vents in the Arctic Ocean between Greenland, Iceland and Norway.

What makes this discovery particularly interesting, scientists said, is the environment in which the bacteria were found. At a level so deep beneath the ocean’s surface, there’s almost no oxygen and extremely high pressure. But researchers said they found that the new species of bacteria were “exceptionally abundant” in this part of the ocean — in some cases, they were even the dominant bacteria. That could suggest that chlamydia and related bacteria play a much bigger role in marine ecology than previously known, researchers said. For now, scientists don’t know for sure what that role is. But this latest discovery signals that there could be more of these bacteria deep under the ocean’s surface. And that might lead to some answers.