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Where Can Bacteria Live?
Microbiologists have found microbes living just about everywhere: in the
soil, water and air; in animals, plants, rocks and even us!
Your body is home to trillions of microbes. Run your tongue over your
teeth—you're licking thousands of microbes that normally live on your teeth,
like those pictured here. Millions of them live on your tongue, too.
A large part of "you" (that is, the mass of
your body) is actually something else: bacteria, viruses and fungi. Isn't
that a weird thought?
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Pick up a fistful of garden soil and you're holding hundreds if not
thousands of different kinds of microbe in your hand. A single teaspoon of
that soil contains over 1,000,000,000 bacteria, about 120,000 fungi and
25,000 algae.
Microbes have been around for billions of years because they are able to
adapt to the ever-changing environment. They can find a home anywhere and
some of them live in places where we once thought NOTHING could survive. |
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For example, scientists have discovered microbes living in the boiling
waters of hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. These microbes "eat"
hydrogen gas and sulphur and "breathe" hydrogen sulphide (a gas that smells
like rotten eggs).
Other heat-loving microbes live in volcanic
cracks miles under the ocean surface where there is no light and the water
is a brew of poisonous arsenic, sulphur and other nasty chemicals. The
little blobs shown in this photo are bacteria that live on mussel shells
around a volcanic vent called the Galapagos Vent.
Other microbes live in the permanently frozen
ice of Antarctica. Microbes have been found living inside the stones that
make up the walls of old cathedrals in Europe.
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