Critics of science journalism have long decried our propensity to write “gee whiz” stories. As if people do science to discover the boring.
Comes now, via a news release (see Grist below), a team of researchers who say they have found a matted tangle of filamentous bacteria lying on the sea floor off Chile and Peru and covering an area as big as Greece, which is 151,000 square miles. (To the right is a micrograph of a thin slice of a mat sample.)
It’s cold, dark and devoid of oxygen down there, but when scientists from the International Census of Marine Microbes sent a camera down on a remotely controlled submersible, they were stunned. Resting on the bottom was “a big carpet of white grass with filaments sticking out and waving in the water,” The Independent‘s Steve Connor quoted a member of the expedition. Analysis of samples revealed the mat was made of bacteria that use hydrogen sulfide and nitrates to get energy, much like microbes on hydrothermal vents.
The Nature News Web site wraps the gee-whiz angle into a story about the marine census’s discovery of microbial species diversity orders of magnitude beyond what had been estimated. Jane Qiu writes that when the project began in 2003, some 6,000 marine microbes were known and microbiologists predicted the true figure could be as much as 600,000. The census is now likely to pass that number and the new estimate is that there could be 20 million kinds of microbial critters at sea. Maybe more.
The Australian ABC’s Anna Salleh takes the gee whiz angle and adds another that the Tracker could not confirm from any other news outlet–that the bacteria were gargantuan, ranging in size from 2 to 7 centimeters in length. She calls them Goliath bacteria.
Among the many claims emerging from the project that merit the GW reaction is that the biomass of all the microbes in the oceans is equivalent to that of 35 African elephants for every human being on Earth. That’s from Margaret Munro of the CanWest news service as published in the Vancouver Sun
Katherine Harmon in Scientific American‘s Observations blog notes that the census has upped the estimate of how many microbes drift in a liter of seawater from 100,000 to more than a billion.
AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid skips the gee-whiz potential and ledes with a comparison of the sea census to the U.S. Census. “Just try to get them [the bugs] to mail back a form,” he writes.
Grist:
The news release from the Census of Marine Life, affiliated with the microbial census project. It has links to more images and to video.
-Boyce Rensberger
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