In 1986 engineers drilling an exploratory hole at a possible construction site in southeastern Romania, near the Black Sea, discovered a cave 80 feet below ground. Taking advantage of the chance find, explorers from the Emil Racovita Speleological Institute of Bucharest soon clambered down the hole. They were stunned by what they saw: the cave was crawling with spiders, scorpions, leeches, millipedes--a rich variety of invertebrate animals, all thriving in total darkness and isolation. One of the explorers, a biologist named Serban Sarbu, later became a refugee from his country’s political troubles. He went to work at the University of Cincinnati for a time before returning to Romania--and the cave--in 1990. Last June, Sarbu and his Cincinnati colleagues finally published a report that showed just how extraordinary the Romanian cave is. It is the first known ecosystem on land that doesn’t derive its energy from sunlight through photosynthesis.
The base ...
