Oceans Are Teeming With Microbial Species
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The world’s oceans contain many more types of microorganisms than had been thought, scientists report.
The study, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found more than 20,000 species in a liter of seawater. “Microbiologists have formally described 5,000 microbial species. This study shows we have barely scratched the surface,” said Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass.
Sogin said the number of different kinds of bacteria in the oceans could exceed 5 million to 10 million.
