Though we often think of viruses as being harmful, many viruses play helpful and intricate roles in our bodies and the environment
“The sense was [eating viruses] doesn’t make much of a caloric difference since they are so small,” says DeLong. “But we think it’s happening all the time in nature at a very large scale.”
And if it happens on a large scale, as the scientists think, it means these substances may make their way up the food web much more efficiently than previously thought.DeLong and colleagues study chloroviruses, which infect the symbiotic algae found within the cells of microbes such as paramecia. Chloroviruses thrive in many freshwater environments, with perhaps up to several million in every milliliter of water.
To test that question, in the lab, DeLong and colleagues added purified chlorovirus to drops of water taken from a small pond near his lab in Nebraska. He wanted to see if there were any “volunteers” that might respond positively to the viruses’ introduction. And some of them did.Next, he added viruses to a petri dish containing large amounts of the ciliate, and they grew quickly and reproduced, surviving only on the virus.
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