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Microbe Mat the Size of Greece Discovered In the Sea
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A mat of microbes the size of Greece has been discovered on the sea floor off the Pacific coast of South America. 'These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet... A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms...'"
Was there any doubt that microbes own our planet and merely tolerate us? (heck, more bacterial DNA in your body than human one...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Considering that is related to (the size of) Greece and that it could grow more, maybe in the future could be called Gaia?
Greg Egan had a nice extrapolation (spoilers) in his Wang's Carpets short (later expanded in the novel Diaspora) that on top of such a large biomass, or rather inside it, a completely virtual world is computed. I.e. the computation substrate is not silicon but biomass following certain rules. This computed universe did not interact with the outside world (and that world lacking predators, it didn't have to) but just created a virtual self contained world.
Interesting. Such giant microbial mats used to be the dominant biological communities in the Precambrian, often forming structures called stromatolites, but most of them were believed to have met their demise during the Cambrian, when lots of new large multicellular critters could literally munch or burrow their way through them. Stromatolites are still present today in a few places, generally in environments too harsh for multicellular organisms to live in, like Shark Bay in Western Australia. But this discovery would indicate that large microbial mat communities proved more evolutionarily durable than previously thought.
Hasn't that been the general biological consensus recently?
Archaeo-lifeforms, being far less specialized seem to be able to both spread widely and cope with marginal or rapidly-changing conditions. Witness jellyfish, etc. When a biome's conditions are very stable over a long period of time, specialist organisms develop that are more efficient (at everything, really) and quickly outcompete the generalist, simpler older forms. As long as the older forms aren't completely extinguished (which logically I'd have to say is relatively unlikely, given their ability to occupy LOTS of niches simultaneously), when the environment again starts changing more rapidly, the specialist forms start to fail and the older generalists come again to the fore.
My guess would be that the location of this mat is otherwise fairly UNfriendly for more-developed forms, leaving it to happily churn away these millions of years without something discovering that it's tasty and nutritious (at least, not enough predators to outpace its reproductive rate).
-Styopa