Bacteria Live Despite Burial in Seafloor Mud for 100 Million Years
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Bacteria live despite burial in seafloor mud for 100 million years:
You know those videos where people open (or even eat?) military rations from World War II? It's shocking to see just how well-preserved these "foods" can be after all those decades. In a way, Yuki Morono and his team of researchers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology flipped that experience around by giving modern food to some old organisms. But their case involved bringing up ancient mud from the seafloor and adding some food to see if anything was alive in there.
There were, in fact, bacteria in the mud, which likely doesn't sound surprising. But given the environment and the age of this stuff-100 million years-it's actually pretty remarkable.
[...] The thing is, the researchers don't think this is just modern bacteria that have made their way deep into the mud. In fact, they shouldn't be able to move at all in that mud. The average space between particles in the clay should be considerably smaller than the size of a bacterium. The presence of microbes in the oldest sediments represent communities that are about as old as the sediment itself, the researchers conclude.
[...] This leads to an extraordinary claim: "Our results suggest that microbial communities widely distributed in organic-poor abyssal sediment consist mainly of aerobes that retain their metabolic potential under extremely low-energy conditions for up to 101.5 [million years]."
[...] So if the researchers are right about what they've found, it's a testament to the fact that life is nothing if not persistent. By slowing down to live within extremely limited means, these bacterial communities may have survived for a simply incredible length of time.
Also At:
100 million-year-old life forms found on the ocean floor
Journal Reference:
Yuki Morono, Motoo Ito, Tatsuhiko Hoshino, et al. Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17330-1)
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