Speaking of our microbial overlords ...

The wreck of the Titanic is being devoured by a microbial super-organism that communicates via some kind of electrical or chemical quorum sensing.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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bklynchris

Yes, the comments to the article are hilarious and this one seems to be in consensus with many comments here (OR, hive mind neuro-bacteria are trying to cloud our understanding of their maritime cousins in their plan to overtake us and turn us into zombies):

“Speaking as a microbiologist, I feel the need to point out that there is POSITIVELY NOTHING ALIEN about an extremophile that exhibits quorum sensing. We’ve been finding these things more and more often as we look in places that were once unaccessible, and it’s honestly becoming commonplace. Don’t say “alien”; it’s not. Not even close. Not even if it’s your birthday.”
frankieboy

I’m setting up a non-profit organization to raise funds to preserve the Titanic.
We must not allow this historic vessel to be destroyed by mindless bacteria, their purported ability to communicate among themselves notwithstanding.
With enough money from governments, foundations, and individuals, we can restore the wreck to it’s wrecked state, and preserve for future generations this inspiring testament to man’s fallibility.
With your help we will stop the bacteria!
Anonymous

Now if only humans could master quorum sensing.
Nelson.C

“Paging Peter Watts. Dr Peter Watts to the sea-green courtesy phone, please.”
Anonymous

..and thus James Cameron is handed this plotline for “Titanic II – a new beginning” wherein a microbial super-organism that communicates via some kind of electrical or chemical quorum sensing starts drawing itself in the nude.
holtt

As stated in a previous comment, Escherichia Synapti (which colonize the brains of humans) relies on a simple carrier wave signal to maintain contact with the greater hive mind. My guess is that in the case of the Titanic, E. Synapti from the brains of those who died on the ship have managed to create their own separate hive mind. It is theorized that at such a great depth, they were unable to connect so formed their own separate hive mind.

This is in fact why Oceanographers often use fiber optic cable now days to communicate with deep water ROVs that visit the Titanic. There’s a real risk that an electrically conductive cable would be used as a crude antenna, leading to cognitive dissonance if the two hive minds connect. In fact the early works of Bob Ballard in 1985 using conductive wires lead to smaller events worldwide, such as CBS cancelling The Dukes of Hazzard.

This is, by the way, not intended to be a factual statement.
Anonymous

Doesn’t nearly every prokaryote communicate by some sort of chemical quorum sensing? This strikes me as just a fancy way to say “shoot, there are iron-eatin bacteria down there.”
planettom

This makes me think of the Robert Serling (brother of Rod Serling, creator of THE TWILIGHT ZONE) novel SOMETHING IS ALIVE ON THE TITANIC. Robert Serling, I see, died last year.
Nadreck

Microbes often use various means to mindlessly make group decisions. The most famous example is the bacteriological spores of some plague floating around inertly, immune from your immune system, giving out the occasional chemical “ping” until they sense enough of a quorum to kill you in one go.
millrick

between the realization that microbial overlords are taking over the universe and the revelation that God hates me, i’m beginning to rethink my tinfoil-hat resistance strategy
- Anonymous
  
  Now that we know they can actually *eat* our tinfoil hats, resistance is futile!
Nadreck

This is also the technology used by Vampire Lords to control their victims via the infection that they inject.
carriem

Just like Orson Scott Card’s “Xenocide”… The Descolada weren’t “varelse” (uncommunicative species), but “ramen” (not the noodles) capable of peaceful coexistence..

We just gotta crack their code
Anonymous

I found the comments to the article in the original link to be hilarious.

To comment on the article.
There’s nothing to say except that Titanic is now a pulsating brain in the dark depths of the Atlantic. It is without a doubt communicating with Atlantis at this point. It “slowly, and surely, draws its plans, against us.”

Seriously though, this kind of thing is always interesting to read. Thanks for sharing it. I’ve always found Titanic a fascinating subject. Even as it decays, it’s interesting.
Anonymous

Actually, this story can be completely dismissed. James Pellegrino is widely known in Titanic history enthusiast circles as a wild exaggerator and promulgator of dramatic but flimsy theories. His book, “Her Name, Titanic” is a mess of inaccuracies and represents many of the wilder and more unsubstantiated stories about the Titanic (and other historical events, as well) as fact.

There is no credible reason to represent a *large population of microbes* as somehow constituting a single organism…unless you are fond of headlines and know you can get them if it relates to the Titanic.
ultranaut

Microbes have been seriously freaking me the fuck out!
Do we really know they aren’t some kind of distributed intelligence? We assume cognitive functions emerge only from brains arranged like the ones we are currently familiar with. These things have been around from the beginning of life on earth, they are absolutely everywhere, and they evolve incredibly fast. We assume they are simple dumb little things mindlessly reproducing, but the more we learn about them the more it seems like we have entirely misunderstood what’s going on.
- Anonymous
  
  They’re not all a single team, you know. Microbes are usually far less related than humans and fish, and you know how well we get along. Besides cooperative sensing, they spend a lot of time trying to poison each other, which is where most of our antibiotics come from.
  - ultranaut
    
    Yeah, I definitely understand all of that. What I’m getting at is more the level of detail in how we view things like this. I lack expertise here, but in my pop-sci derived view it is my impression that we’ve imagined microbes too atomistically. We’ve tended to look at them as a bunch of single celled animals doing their own thing in an entirely mechanical manner.
    
    Think of ants:
    We can watch two species of ant fight each other one on one, colony on colony, or species on species. We tend not to notice the most epic battles because they are dispersed across time and space in a manner our own species has a difficult time recognizing. We’re chilling in the backyard sipping beers watching an ant fighting another ant, at most we notice there’s an ant colony in our yard under attack by other ants. We entirely miss that it’s the spearhead of a multi-century territorial expansion that began hundreds of miles away and long before humans even settled in the area.