Life Finds a Way

And sometimes, the way that life finds is horrifying. There is a cave in what is now Romania that was separated from the rest of the world five and a half million years ago. No nutrients make it into the cave via groundwater, thanks to a thick layer of impermeable clay soil above, oxygen levels are about half of atmosphere normal while carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide are present in abundance. Plainly, this is as close to Hell on Earth as it gets. And yet for all that time, life didn’t just hang on – it thrived. Visitors to the cave have to check their arachnophobia at the door though – the creatures that survived in this sulphurous miasma are rather unsettling specimens. Cave spiders, water scorpions and leeches abound, part of an ecosystem that relies on bacteria that coat the surface of the cave’s underground lake like scum, which in turn extract their energy from a rare process of chemosynthesis. Beautiful, really. And at the same time, repulsive. When I learned about this cave a few weeks ago, I had to tell Becky. She has an affinity for all things creepy and crawly, and naturally begged me to write “a poem type comic” so that she would have an excuse to draw these little horrors. And so I did.