Do Turkish lakes hold answers about life on other planets? Images & Stories/Alamy Stock Photo

If you want to visit Mars, visit Turkey. That’s where you’ll find lakes so salty that the only bugs able to live there are species that could probably survive on Mars as well.

For that reason, microbiologists in Turkey have surveyed the array of species that inhabit the Acigol, Salda and Yarisli lakes. They’re hopeful that studying some of them will yield useful insights into the kinds of biology that could help microbes exist on Mars or other potentially habitable planets and moons.

Evidence from Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, for example, has revealed oceans that are extremely salty, with pH levels well into the alkaline range, from 9 to 12. The three Turkish lakes have values ranging from 8.6 to 9.5.


“What we would like is to identify species [that give us the] potential to study survival on Mars or in other extraterrestrial conditions,” says Nurgül Balci of Istanbul Technical University, and head of the team surveying the lakes for Mars-tolerant bugs.

The species used for studies on the biology needed to survive on Mars include one called Carnobacterium viridians, which was itself discovered in sediments of Lake Salda.

Balci now thinks it should be possible to find many other species that qualify as “Mars bugs”, providing a broader range of clues on what it takes to be a Martian.

Taking a dip

Balci and her colleague, Cansu Demirel, were inspired to scour the lakes after noticing that certain types of “white rock” formations on Mars resemble those in and around the lake called stromatolites.

These mineral growths are strange combinations of lake sediments bound together by magnesium and calcium carbonates secreted by microbes.

“The metals are carried into the lakes from surrounding rock, and the bacteria metabolise them into carbonates,” says Demirel, who presented the team’s results last month in Vienna, Austria, at the meeting of the European Geosciences Union.

Demirel is now studying whether bacteria from samples of lake water are capable of building stromatolites from scratch if the water contains extra magnesium and calcium. Ultimately, the researchers hope to identify and test species both one by one and in combination to see how they stand up to Mars-like conditions.

“We may discover, for example, that stromatolite-producing bugs leave fingerprints in the rocks, such as unusual magnesium isotopes, that could prove the bio-origins of rock samples from Mars,” says Balci.

“This is a nice survey of lake environments where extremophiles exist,” says Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

It remains to be seen, he says, whether these lakes will prove useful for studying the kinds of organism that might have lived in watery environments on early Mars.

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