You know when you are exploring a dungeon in a “Legend of Zelda” game and you discover some secret tunnel and get rewarded with a little jingle? Well, I’m not a scientist, but I can only assume that something like this happened to a group of Romanian workers that was testing ground in order to build a power plant and accidentally stumbled upon a cave that had been untouched for 5.5 million years and was filled with species never before seen on earth.
This cave is called the Movile Cave and, according to the BBC, only around 100 people have been allowed inside since it was discovered in 1986 because, like a “Zelda” dungeon, this cave is littered with traps and other dangers.
To get into the cave, you first have to lower yourself 20m with a rope into complete darkness. Then you must climb through narrow tunnels until you get to a cavern with a lake.
However, this isn’t the type of lake you want to kick back and relax in since it is filled with carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide and only contains 10% oxygen. The next trial of the cave requires you to swim through confining passageways in the lake and emerge in air spaces, likely costing you at least a couple of heart pieces.
While the BBC’s story claims that humans can’t stay in the cave for longer than five or six hours without having kidneys problems, there are beings that have managed to live in the cave, many in fact. Scientists have found 48 species in the cave and 33 of them have never been found anywhere else on the planet.
These creatures range from snails to spiders to leeches and even waterscorpions. These animals have been trapped in the cave for millions of years and have changed over time because of its conditions. Many of the creatures have no eyes because there is no light. Instead they have long appendages so they can navigate in the dark, and most of them also have no pigment in their skin, making them completely translucent.
While it was clear that many creatures were able to live in this toxic cave, what was unclear at first was how they were doing it. According to the report, while most caves are supplied with nutrients from surface fluids, the Movile Cave gets its water from spongy sandstones beneath it, however this water doesn’t contain food particles.
So where do these creatures get their food? The answer is an unusual process called chemosynthesis. On the surface, plants use photosynthesis to gain energy but this isn’t an option in the pitch black cave. Instead, the animals thrive off bacteria that gets its necessary energy from chemical reactions like the oxidation of sulphide or ammonium.
Studying these peculiar animals in this equally strange environment also lead scientists to question how the animals got in the cave.
"It's very likely that the bacteria have been there a lot longer than 5 million years, but that the insects became trapped there around that time," microbiologist J. Colin Murrell told the BBC. "They could have simply fallen in and become trapped when the limestone cast dropped, sealing the cave until it was discovered again in 1986."
These translucent, eyeless, slimy creatures could have been in this cave uninterrupted for 5.5 million years before humans came along to crash the party. Sadly, if you are crazy enough to want to enter this cave and hang out with waterscorpions and leeches and breathe air that has about 100 times more carbon dioxide than our air, you can’t. The cave is sealed by the Romanian authorities but you can take comfort in the fact that even in modern times our planet still has secrets to be found and places to be discovered.
For photos of the creatures in the Movile Cave, go to BBC.com and look up Jasmin Fox-Skelly's article titled “The bizarre beasts living in Romania’s poison cave.”