A single Liter of Seawater Can Hold More Than One Billion Microorganisms

Posted on April 20, 2010  Comments (0)

Mat of microbes the size of Greece discovered on seafloor

mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans’ total biomass, according to newly released data.

These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet, and researchers working on the decade-long Census of Marine Life project found one such seafloor mat off the Pacific coast of South America that is roughly the size of Greece.

A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms, the census scientists reported. But these small creatures don’t just live in the water column or on the seafloor. Large communities of microscopic animals have even been discovered more than one thousand meters beneath the seafloor. Some of these deep burrowers, such as loriciferans, are only a quarter of a millimeter long.

“Far from being a lifeless desert, the deep sea rivals such highly diverse ecosystems as tropical rainforests and coral reefs,”

Microbes help to turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into usable carbon, completing about 95 percent of all respiration in the Earth’s oceans…

Related: Iron-breathing Species Isolated in Antarctic for Millions of YearsLife Far Beneath the OceanLife Untouched by the Sun

Leave a Reply