In the Namib Desert a rock is not just a rock. Turn it over and you will find that underneath it is teeming with life — ‘cryptic” microbial life, that is.
‘We were basically looking at things that live on the undersides of rocks,” says Professor Don Cowan, founder and director of the Institute for Microbial Biotechnology and Metagenomics (IMBM) at the University of the Western Cape, explaining the term.
Until recently, these tiny organisms had not often come under the microscope, he says. ‘Although there’s been a lot of research in the Namib, very little of it has been on microbiology. It’s a pretty underworked area.”
In April Cowan led an international team of scientists, teachers and journalists for the ‘Spaceward Bound” field expedition. The week-long expedition — with senior Nasa scientist Dr Chris McKay — was based at Namibia’s Gobabeb research station and marked the project’s first visit to Africa.
Participants came from South Africa, Namibia, Australia and the United States. Spaceward Bound expeditions have been running since 2006 when the first group of scientists and teachers, led by McKay, gathered in the Atacama Desert in Chile to examine tiny microbial organisms in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.
Since then expeditions have been carried out in the Mojave Desert in California, the Arkaroola Region in Australia and the Arctic and Antarctic. These regions all have elements similar to landscapes in space: formation, rocks and lack of water.
It’s hoped that by examining how life exists in such extreme conditions, they will be better equipped to search for evidence of life (tiny microbes) on the moon and Mars. Buddy Visagie, a teacher at Duneside High School in Namibia, took part in last month’s expedition.
‘As a kid growing up in the Namib Desert, we normally take things for granted. I have been to Gobabeb research station a few times but the focus was usually on plant and animal life,” he says.
‘This was the first time that I really realised that a stone can be a small habitat for micro-organisms; stones that we normally pick up and toss away without thinking about destroying the fragile habitat living under it.”
Although Visagie feels there should be more local participation, he says the expedition was a great success. Cowan agrees. ‘The participation between scientists and teachers was really good; there was an obvious desire from the teachers to learn as much as they could,” he says.
Cowan explains that when the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement decided to fund the expedition, the intention — which had been to include a few South African teachers — shifted: two journalists and a videographer were invited instead, to prepare a catalogue of educational materials that will be disseminated to a wider audience.
These materials include a short film and a fact sheet on cryptic microbial life that will be integrated into the life sciences curriculum and distributed to high schools around the country.