Little Bitty Critters, Lots of Them!

This is a photo of a "Red Tide" wave breaking on the beach at Carlsbad California. The Tide water is red, But the action of the wave excites the biolumenecent factors of the Eukaryotes.
more dinofagellate eukaryotes



There are little bitty critters all around us, in fact there are so many little bitty critters that they outweigh all of us big critters.

When you think of "biomass" you think of trees and grasses, elephants and giraffes-es. Some people think of ants and termites, some even thing of amoebas and euglenas, but few think of bacteria’s and viruses, they are just too small to count right? Right…
Take a deep breath and hold you nose while we explore “micro-critter world”.

All the world's a phage: viruses that eat bacteria abound—and surprise - bacteriophages


"Smaller than bacteria, some of them look like microscopic spacecraft. You can find them almost anywhere' under a rosebush or miles out to sea. These strange entities are bacteriophages, viruses that prey upon bacteria, and there's a staggering number of them. A pinch of soil or drop of seawater, for example, contains many millions of bacteriophages.
"They're nature's most successful experiment," says Marisa Pedulla of the University of Pittsburgh. "They outnumber all the bacteria, all the humans, whales, trees, et cetera, put together."



Remember those MRSA's? (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)

Well check what the soviets do with virus bactereia eating microphages. I hope Kim Sallaway reads this. He almost lost his Camera Shutter finger to a MRSA.




"In the 1920s and '30s, with diseases like dysentery and cholera running rampant, the discovery of bacteriophages was hailed as a breakthrough. Bacteriophages are viruses found virtually everywhere—from soil to seawater to your intestines—that kill specific, infection-causing bacteria. In the United States, the drug company Eli Lilly marketed phages for abscesses and respiratory infections. (Sinclair Lewis' Pulitzer-winning Arrowsmith is about a doctor who uses phages to prevent a diphtheria epidemic.) But by the 1940s, American scientists stopped working with phages for treatment because they no longer had reason to. Penicillin, discovered by the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming in 1928, had become widely available thanks to synthetic production and zapped infections without the expertise needed for finicky phages."

Rather that trying to kill the bacteria with a antibiotic, they simply give the bacteria the micro-world version of the "Bird-Flu". by giving the MRSA a viral infection that kills the bacteria, but not the patient. Tidy, right?

Bacteria under ice

A white mat of bacteria with clams living in the top was found on the icy sea floor 2,800 feet down, on the bottom of the sea under the Larsen B Ice Shelf. The ice shelf was 600 feet thick before it broke up in 2002. The water is some of the coldest on earth. There is no possibility of food or light reaching into those depths under the ice shelf. Yet there is bacteria and clams living there. There is no explanation what this under ice bacteria and clams are living on.


“You do not expect to find a lot of food down there falling from the sea surface, because of the ice shelf," Although this has changed since the collapse of the ice shelf, the sea-bottom life still seems to be independent of usual oceanic food sources.”



Bacteria 1,000 feet beneath the seafloor.

In a scientific "time Sharing arrangement" scientist used a drill hole made by other scientist to test for bacteria in the porous basalt rock beneath the sea floor.

"CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study has discovered an abundance of microbial life deep beneath the ocean floor in ancient basalt that forms part of the Earth's crust, in research that once more expands the realm of seemingly hostile or remote environments in which living organisms can apparently thrive."



"Until now we knew practically nothing about the biology of areas such as this, but we found about the same amount of bacteria in that water as you might find in surrounding seawater in the ocean. It was abundant."


Viruses kill deep-sea bacteria

The deep sea covers two thirds of the Earth’s surface. Bacteria are the dominant life form in the sediments of the sea floor. “There are 100 million to 100 billion bacteria per gram of sediment,” Professor Antonio Dell’Anno of the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy, one of the authors of the paper, said. “This adds up to a huge amount of carbon on the global scale.”


The scientists found that viruses are responsible for almost all bacterial mortality in deep sea sediments, and that at depths beyond 1,000 metres viral mortality is close to 100%. The viruses effectively split the bacteria open, releasing their cell contents into the environment where the nutrients are quickly re-used by other, as yet uninfected, bacteria. Professor Dell’Anno describes the process as a kind of 'deep sea cannibalism' that effectively accelerates the carbon cycle.



Thirty percent of feces is critters.

There is a story about the young lady that invited her boyfriend to the family farm for lunch. After lunch the young ladies father pushed back from the table, excused himself and said, “Sorry, but I gotta’ go spread some manure on the pasture”.


Mortified by her fathers lack of class by saying manure at the dinner table, the young lady cornered her mother in the kitchen and said, “Can’t you teach father to say “Fertilizer” instead of “manure”?


The mother said, “Just never you mind young lady, it took me ten years to get him to stop calling it shit”.


FECES AND EXCREMENT FACTS
Quoted from Encyclopedia Britannica
"also spelled faeces, also called excrement solid bodily waste discharged from the large intestine through the anus during defecation. Feces are normally removed from the body one or two times a day. About 100 to 250 grams (3 to 8 ounces) of feces are excreted by a human adult daily.Normally, feces are made up of 75 percent water and 25 percent solid matter. About 30 percent of the solid matter consists of dead bacteria; about 30 percent consists of indigestible food matter such as cellulose; 10 to 20 percent is cholesterol and other fats; 10 to 20 percent is inorganic substances such as calcium phosphate and iron phosphate; and 2 to 3 percent is protein. Cell debris shed from the mucous membrane of the intestinal tract also passes in the waste material, as do bile pigments (bilirubin) and dead leukocytes (white blood cells). The brown color of feces is due to the action of bacteria on bilirubin, which is the end product of the breakdown of hemoglobin (red blood cells). The odour of feces is caused by the chemicals indole, skatole, hydrogen sulfide, and mercaptans, which are produced by bacterial action.Many diseases and disorders can affect bowel function and produce abnormalities in the feces. Constipation is characterized by infrequent evacuations and the production of excessively hard and dry feces, while diarrhea results in frequent defecation and excessively soft, watery feces. Bleeding in the stomach or intestines may result in the passage of blood with the stool, which appears dark red, tarry, or black. Fatty or greasy stools usually indicate pancreatic or small-intestine afflictions. Typhoid, cholera, and amoebic dysentery are among diseases spread by the contamination of food with the feces of infected persons."


Now for the "biggie".

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13960

Huge hidden biomass lives deep beneath the seafloor.

I'll highlight the details here for you. Scientists are pretty smart people, but sadly they can't speak in a language that anybody can understand. So, just like Lawyers, somebody has to tell normal people what they said in simple terms. I'm not normal, but I'm fairly simple, so I'll tell you what they said.


They said:
Just a little over a mile beneath the seafloor, where the temperature is about 212 degrees Fahrenheit, they have found life where they least expected to find it. Furthermore, the rocks beneath the sea are teeming with life.

A scientist by the name of John Parkes has discovered a organism called a “Prokaryote”. Prokaryotes are an organism that often has only one cell. Parkes says, “Where cells living so far beneath the sea floor could have come from remains a mystery. They may have been gradually buried in sediment as millions of years passed by, and adapted to the increasing temperatures and pressure” or “that they were sucked deep into the mud from the sea water above. Hydrothermal vents pulse hot water out of the seabed and into the ocean. This creates a vacuum in the sediment, which draws fresh sea water into the marine aquifer.”






About 60% of the cells Parkes and his team found were alive. They are related to organisms found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Depending on the depth, between one in 20 and one in 10 of the cells were dividing, which is the normal way prokaryotes reproduce.

Parkes goes on to say: “It is important to understand the way the cells got down there, because that has implications for their age. The cells are not very active and according to Parkes they have very few predators. "We find very few viruses, for example, down there," he says. "At the surface, if you don't divide you get eaten. But if there are no predators, the pressure to reproduce decreases and you can spend more energy on repairing your damaged molecules."

Now, wouldn’t it be nice if our cells could repair themselves instead of worrying about getting eaten. After reading a little bit more I began to understand the implications of “No Predators”. Some of the cells that Parks is studying are up to 120 million years old.

Even more fantastic than the depth and temperature that these cells grow, or I should say, live, is the amount of them. “the rocks beneath the oceans could be home to the largest population of prokaryotes on Earth, and account for one tenth of all living carbon. He estimates the combined undersea biomass could be equivalent to that of all the plants on Earth.”

Let me repeat for the unscientific people; The biomass beneath the seabed is as much as the surface vegetation of the Earth!

And, that's just the critters beneath the seafloor.