the.com/bacteria
the original tenants of Earth, still outnumbering and outliving every guest they invited.
means Single-celled microorganisms, mostly tiny and lacking a nucleus, that live nearly everywhere and range from harmless to helpful to deadly.
from From the Greek 'baktērion,' a little staff or rod — a diminutive of 'baktron,' meaning stick or cane — because the first ones studied under the microscope looked like minuscule rods. The word entered scientific Latin in the 19th century as microscopy revealed this hidden world, and it remains plural at heart: one of them is properly a 'bacterium.'
- body count
- your cells are roughly half bacterial by number
- deep time
- thrived 3 billion years before animals existed
- extreme survivors
- some live in boiling vents and nuclear reactors
- oxygen makers
- ancient bacteria first filled the sky with breathable air
- gene swap
- trade DNA sideways, not just to offspring
escherichia coli — rod-shaped bacterium found in human intestines, discovered 1885
streptococcus pneumoniae — spherical bacterium causing pneumonia, identified as leading bacterial pneumonia pathogen
vibrio cholerae — comma-shaped bacterium causing cholera, responsible for 2010 haiti epidemic killing 10,000
mycobacterium tuberculosis — rod-shaped bacterium causing tuberculosis, infects 10 million people annually worldwide