Hey davidmcafeescience this is a really cool question! There are so many, but I am going to go with two: The first is one that I work with. It is called burkholderia pseudomallei and gives you the disease melioidosis, which can kill you in a couple of days! I find this bacteria super weird because of how it lives. It makes a capsule around itself when it lives in water or soil and it has no food. Then it sort of goes dormant like a volcano for up to 50 years! When the conditions are right, they re-activate themselves! The scary thing is they do this in humans too. They can hide inside us by making a sort of fort out of our own cells around them, and our immune systems can’t find them. This makes them super hard to treat. Then they can go dormant again for years and years, and you might not even know they are inside you! For reasons we don’t know, then they reactivate themselves again and can kill you for no reason once they do! Scray stuff, but so weird the way they play hide and seek!
The other bacteria I find super weird is called is a group that make their own magnets! No joke! These guys can make tiny metal ball magnets inside them, and they coat them in a thin layer of fat. The magnets are called magnetosomes and are 1 million times smaller than a mm! These magnetosomes can actually be kept by exploding the bacteria and separating them with a magnet! Then we can use the tiny magnets in all sorts of science and medical experiments where we need magnets too small for us to easily make!
Deinococcus radiodurans it is a radioresistant organisms. This means that is can survive and live of RADIOACTIVE substances! It can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid, and is therefore known as a polyextremophile. Turns out that Deinococcus radiodurans is listed in the The Guinness Book Of World Records as the world’s toughest bacterium discovered to date!
I think that is totally impressive 😀
What have you come across?
Hey davidmcafeescience this is a really cool question! There are so many, but I am going to go with two: The first is one that I work with. It is called burkholderia pseudomallei and gives you the disease melioidosis, which can kill you in a couple of days! I find this bacteria super weird because of how it lives. It makes a capsule around itself when it lives in water or soil and it has no food. Then it sort of goes dormant like a volcano for up to 50 years! When the conditions are right, they re-activate themselves! The scary thing is they do this in humans too. They can hide inside us by making a sort of fort out of our own cells around them, and our immune systems can’t find them. This makes them super hard to treat. Then they can go dormant again for years and years, and you might not even know they are inside you! For reasons we don’t know, then they reactivate themselves again and can kill you for no reason once they do! Scray stuff, but so weird the way they play hide and seek!
The other bacteria I find super weird is called is a group that make their own magnets! No joke! These guys can make tiny metal ball magnets inside them, and they coat them in a thin layer of fat. The magnets are called magnetosomes and are 1 million times smaller than a mm! These magnetosomes can actually be kept by exploding the bacteria and separating them with a magnet! Then we can use the tiny magnets in all sorts of science and medical experiments where we need magnets too small for us to easily make!
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David they are all strange lol
But I think so far the coolest that I have come across is Deinococcus radiodurans:
https://vonneumannmachine.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/d_radiodurans.jpg
Deinococcus radiodurans it is a radioresistant organisms. This means that is can survive and live of RADIOACTIVE substances! It can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid, and is therefore known as a polyextremophile. Turns out that Deinococcus radiodurans is listed in the The Guinness Book Of World Records as the world’s toughest bacterium discovered to date!
I think that is totally impressive 😀
What have you come across?
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