This section of the blog features one microbe per article. It’s a great primer to get to know the members of the microbial world.
Head on below to meet a microbe or two!
I was inspired to write this poem (first poem on The Microbial Menagerie!) from a writing workshop I’ve been taking. We were reading Workshop by BIlly Collins, and there was a line in there “Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery? There’s something about death going on here.” that this is loosely based upon.
This post is part of the Meet a Microbe series on the blog. Check it out to meet other microbes! In 2006, Carsonella ruddii was reported as the smallest of the small: this microbe contains the smallest genome identified at the time, clocking in at 159,662 base pairs encoding 182 genes. The Escherichia coli genome on the…
This post is part of the Meet a Microbe series on the blog. Check it out to meet other microbes! It is commonly believed that bacteria are microscopic – stealthy and hidden from the naked eye. But the bacterium, Epulopiscium fishelsoni, is a microbial behemoth you can see with the human eye alone. First discovered in the…
This post is part of the Meet a Microbe series on the blog. Check it out to meet other microbes! Meet Deinococcus radiodurans, one of the world’s toughest bacterium. It’s an extremophile and one of the most radiation-resistant organisms known on Earth. This hardy little bacterium can survive over a thousand times the amount of radiation that…
This post is part of the Meet a Microbe series on the blog. Check it out to meet other microbes! When it comes to predators, we naturally think of large, agile, and powerful animals on the prowl. But we often don’t think about the most abundant predators on our planet, predators of the microscopic world. In the…