The news is full of announcements about newly discovered forms of life. This fall, we learned of a 30,000-year-old giant virus found in frozen Siberia. Until now, known viruses have contained so little genetic information that people have questioned whether they can even be thought of as living. But giant viruses like this one contain as much information as many bacteria, which are certainly alive, and are so big they can be seen with an ordinary microscope.
Earlier this year, we heard that deep in the ocean, by the boiling hot sulfurous vent called Loki’s Castle after the Norse god, a species called Lokiarchaeota was discovered. It uniquely straddles the three domains of life: Eukaryota, including animals and plants; Bacteria; and Archaea, a domain that includes species pumping out methane in your gut right now.
Not only are new life forms being discovered, but so are entirely new ways of living. In the last week we learned of rich communities of bacteria that communicate with each other electrically, in the same ways as the neurons in our brain.
The way researchers made these three discoveries illustrates how much the modern study of biodiversity has changed in the last 200 years. Instead of visiting pleasantly warm places with binoculars and a butterfly net, we now look for life in places we never would have before, and we use the same molecular techniques that help catch criminals.
To Boldly Go …
Traditionally, the study of biodiversity was carried out by gentlemen such as Charles Darwin and Joseph Banks, sailing the high seas of global empires and sending back specimens to be stored in drawers of museums of natural history.
