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Asked by anon-200919 to Rosemary, Oliver, Leigh, Jordan, Hannah, David on 6 Mar 2019.
Question: How do micro-organisms occur
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David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 6 Mar 2019:
Micro-organisms live virtually everywhere! Note that these aren’t just bacteria (even though they’re my favourite), there are other microscopic organisms like funghi, protozoa (single-celled eukaryotic organisms), microscopic algae, little tardigrades (very adorable microscopic “bears”) and many more – there’s a whole world hidden behind a microscope. Basically anything you look at (your spit, soil, pond water, …) will be full of little wriggling creatures.
I hope this is what you were asking about, or did I misunderstand?
Comments
anon-200919 commented on :
Thank you for answering. What is the most common type of micro-organism/
David commented on :
What an awesome follow-up question! 🙂 Bacteria are the most common group of microorganisms – there’s so many of them that they’d come out second when comparing all life on earth by weight, just behind plants – despite being so small!
But wait! Bacteria actually have their own little viruses that infect them, called bacteriophages. People estimate that there are at least 10x as many bacteriophages as bacteria in the world – this actually makes bacteriophages the most common type of microorganism 🙂
And to visualise just how many of them there are: despite being so super tiny (bacteriophages are between 20-200 nm long, which is at least 10 times smaller than bacteria, which in turn are 1000x smaller than a flea), there are so many bacteriophages in the world that if you were to gather them all up and put them into a long row, this chain of bacteriophages would be longer than *our galaxy*!
Bacteriophage size comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9beBIGAoMlI (called “phage” in the clip)
All life on earth weighed in comparison – https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/05/24/a-planetary-census-puts-humans-in-their-place