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It is easy for children to come up with questions for biologists that none can answer, and that none has even tried to answer. Biologists are almost unique amo
by moloch-hai 4y ago
It is easy for children to come up with questions for biologists that none can answer, and that none has even tried to answer.
Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know about their subject. Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
- eru 4y ago> Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know [...] Citation needed. > Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do. Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all. The novel finding was a critter that lives / can live solely on viruses.
- abudabi123 4y ago> Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You > eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all. When an engineer walks in front of an idling jet engine you don't say the jet eats viruses.
- eru 4y agoTo be more precise, viruses are just made up of proteins and DNA / RNA. Your normal digestion that can handle proteins and DNA/RNA from animals, plants etc doesn't have any more problem breaking down virus proteins into amino acids and absorbing them.
- whatshisface 4y agoI think the OP was talking about the bacteria that derive non-negligible sustenance from viruses. >Moreover, our foraging trials demonstrated robust growth in the Halteria population with only chloroviruses as food (rint = 0.66 ± 0.26 [SD], black lines, Fig. 1A), with minimal to no growth in the controls (with chloroviruses filtered out; rint = 0.22 ± 0.12 [SD], blue lines, Fig. 1C). The abundance of the larger Paramecium did not increase in treatment or control trials (Fig. 1D), indicating that not all ciliates can grow on chloroviruses in these conditions, even when they consume them. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215000120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215000120
- eru 4y agoYes, I know. That's why I wrote >> Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do. > Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all. > The novel finding was a critter that lives / can live solely on viruses.
- moloch-hai 4y agoYou wrote it, but it was what we all understood already, making writing it nothing but an exercise in snark.
- eru 4y agoNot sure. Eg creatures that eat plastic are still news, even if plastic is not their sole diet.
- moloch-hai 4y agoYet, you are eating plastic every day.
- eru 4y agoYes, but not digesting it.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago> Citation needed How could you possible find a citation for that? It’s not even pretending to be a scientific or totally objective claim. Asking for a citation for this type of statement is no way to have a discussion. Do you not see why?
- eru 4y agoEh, 'Citation needed.' was my admittedly somewhat snarky way of calling bullshit. Most any scientist will happily babble all about the stuff they don't know yet in their discipline, because that's exactly where the excitement lies for them.
- moloch-hai 4y agoSome do. Many don't. Much of Wikipedia is "curated" by retired professors carefully scrubbing mention of anything new that makes their graduate thesis look ill-conceived.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eru 4y ago> Much of Wikipedia is "curated" by retired professors carefully scrubbing mention of anything new that makes their graduate thesis look ill-conceived. What makes you think so? What evidence do you have?
- moloch-hai 4y agoHave you read any of it?