Having time on your hands can be a good or bad thing but the Devil can wait. Reading about viruses leads me to a load of info that had passed me by about the contents of the world's oceans. The obambulation is that this blog post wanders around and has no real point: just a bunch of stuff...but in reality that is all any of my blog-posts are, a reference to look back on.
First point, is a virus an orgaism at all? Well that is debatable...and debated: "From single-celled organisms to human populations, viruses affect all life on earth", "Although viruses challenge our concept of what "living" means, they are vital members of the web of life" and even an impact on evolution?
There are about ten x as many viruses in the oceans as there are bacteria [UW last week...that's the most recent link] and there is A LOT of bacteria. The viruses are numerous but they weigh almost nothing (relatively) and make up about 5% of the ocenas 'organisms'. Bacteria, [LINK] though ten times less numerous, weigh twenty x an average virus and the bacteria make up more than 90% of ocean biomass [PDF] so
"95% to 98% of the biomass in the ocean is in microbes, which produce about half of the oxygen on the planet."
There are more than 1030 viruses on Earth and the oceans are...er, An Ocean of Viruses. "The sheer number of viruses and their intimate relationship with microbial life suggest that viruses play a critical role in the planet’s biosphere."
"Ocean viruses may turn over as much as 150 gigatons of carbon per year... "
"This recycling of carbon and other nutrients suggests that viruses need to be considered in quantitative, dynamic models of global change."
Aha, maybe there was a point after all.
Image info: The viruses, colored orange, attached to a membrane vesicle from the
SAR11 marine bacteria, colored gray, that was the subject of this study.Morris et al./Nature Microbiology
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