Most animals depend on their gut microbes for digestive help. The caterpillar, however, seems to lack resident gut microbes all together. By characterizing the microbial composition across 124 species of caterpillars from North America and Costa Rica, Tobin Hammer and colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder found that caterpillars do not have microbial friends…
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…
Growing up, Jesus Romo never thought he would become a microbiologist. “I actually wanted to be a paleontologist as a kid and [my parents] always bought me books about dinosaurs and dinosaur toys,” he says. Now Jesus is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at San Antonio studying fungus in the lab. When…
When the sun vanishes behind the moon, living organisms behave as if twilight is here. Crickets start to chirp, flowers close up, and cows head to the barn. In this year’s highly anticipated solar eclipse, microbes will also fly high in the sky on giant balloons as part of a citizen science project called the…
For most of us, the thought of sanitizing our kitchen sponges never crossed our minds. And that’s probably a good thing. Scientists from Germany recently reported what they found living inside kitchen sponges. They took samples from 14 used kitchen sponges and extracted DNA. What they found was an astounding 54 billion bacteria cells per…