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Black smokers lie nearly two miles deep at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The sulphides they produce are food for microscopic bacteria that are - in turn - consumed by giant tube worms that are 11 feet long and have neither mouth nor gut. Instead they absorb the bacteria through their thin skin. Clams that are two feet across also consume the bacteria. The heated water rising above the smokers causes currents along the sea bottom that sweep small particles towards the vents so a whole community of creatures can feed on them. These include small white blind crabs. Until this colony was discovered, it had been thought that all creatures on Earth derived their energy from the sun. Even the deep sea creatures we knew of fed on fragments of food that fell from the sun-touched surface. However, there are animals here that owe nothing to the sun but are sustained through bacteria by the chemical energy of volcanoes.