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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...'"
News at nine.
At the bottom of the ocean is a good metaphor for Greece's economy right now!
nt
And 80% as hairy which is the most impressive part.
It's not a bug, it's a fixture!
The structure that looks surprisingly like a gigantic neural network is not, repeat not, the repository of a vast and vengeful consciousness of the murky deeps.
Please carry on with your regularly scheduled consumption.
Hmmm???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
can I eat it?
Liar. Your user name implies you may be the avatar of this very consciousness!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
does this mean we will need to bail them out as well?
Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind
Have you drunk your fill?
It really would be amazing if such an organism gained sentience...
But does it run Linux?
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
I, for one, would like to be the first to welcome our new world Underlords.
has anyone seen a map of Greece with all it's crazy islands and jagged coasts? How can you compare the size of anything to that country
Next time, compare vs something with a somewhat reasonable shape.
like Saskatchewan damnit!
Size of Greece eh? I bet it's more intelligent than the average Greek.
It's the lost city of Atlantis!
... and then they built the supercollider.
What's this? A science story from NewYorkCountyLawyer? I had you pigeonholed as a "copyrights' infringement" kind-of-guy. Perhaps people are not entire one-dimensional after all.
My god - do you know what this means? There exists the possibility that the Slashdot groupthink has unfairly prejudiced itself against against high-profile posters.
What have we done? Of the humanity!
We might have also unfairly treated Roland Piquepaille!
Actually on balance I feel that we're probably fairly safe there.
A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms..
Well, considering a tablespoon of human semen contains million of sperm, one billion microorganisms in a liter of fluid doesn't seem to unreasonable.
I'm guessing a mat of microbes the size of Greece probably has a better economy than a piece of land the size of Greece.
In these parts, the standard Unit Of Hugeness is "N times the size of Wales"....
Considering that is related to (the size of) Greece and that it could grow more, maybe in the future could be called Gaia?
Just goes to show what can happen when you give something 4-5 billion years to debug.
Now I know I didn't read TFA, but how does the RIAA/MPAA fit into this story? Are they suing the microbes for copyright infringement as well?? Heartless bastards.
... a fungus among us.
Have gnu, will travel.
...welcome our new plankton overlords!
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Who thought it read Microsoft map the size of greece discovered under the sea on the first read.
I need to get out more!
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.
This is a bit of an odd submission from NewYorkCountryLawyer. Is the microbial mat a client? What sort of music is it accused of filesharing? That might give us some insight into its nature.
It would be really cool if it was the Leviathan. I'd like to see it go after the RIAA labels, towering over terrified Sony execs as they ran for their lives.
Loose lips lose spit.
I bet the result would not be very fun...
A long term gradient from this to the oxygen free microbes we've recently heard about and you've got a life cycle that creates oil. Now if that's the case we should capture some samples, diddle some DNA to accellerate the process and create an algae sequence that takes garbage and produces gasoline - or experiences runaway growth and turns the entire planet into green slime.
Hm... the plot's going to need some work but for a rough sketch that will do for a start.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You probably picked this article to submit because of your daily dealings with other types of slime molds.
I don't recall that he addressed how the inscrutable sentient ocean actually came to be.
In any case, Solaris gets my vote as one of the three greatest science fiction novels ever.
My god those are big microbes. (Pity the title seems to take an alternative view on the issue)
It is what it is.
...He might have been onto something!
Yang is building a planetbuster, we much achieve transcendence with planet before its too late! Move a foil ship to that microbe hex stat!
everybody run for cover
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
will it blend?
without pics.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I believe you meant to say, "Yes, their is."
My pics.
I find it strange that original article in SA does not present any pictures (or any other methodological reference for that matter) of the glorified "mat".
That's it?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Quick, cover it with sediment, wait a few million years, and voila... more oil!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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
How do they breathe and receive food? even the cells of our bodies need circulated blood in vessels to receive oxygen and food. How would they do it if the weren't attached with vessels in between?
Wasn't this the star of a 1958 movie? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/
Looks like it's working on a remake http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1501672/
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Dear? Didn't you lose your microbe mat yesterday? I think I found it