Marine viruses

Viruses are small infectious agents that do not have their own metabolism and can replicate only inside the living cells of other organisms. Viruses can infect all types of life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. The linear size of the average virus is about one one-hundredth that of the average bacterium. Most viruses cannot be seen with an optical microscope so electron microscopes are used instead.

Viruses are found wherever there is life and have probably existed since living cells first evolved. The origin of viruses is unclear because they do not form fossils, so molecular techniques have been used to compare the DNA or RNA of viruses and are a useful means of investigating how they arise.

Viruses are now recognized as ancient and as having origins that pre-date the divergence of life into the three domains. But the origins of viruses in the evolutionary history of life are unclear: some may have evolved from plasmids—pieces of DNA that can move between cells—while others may have evolved from bacteria. In evolution, viruses are an important means of horizontal gene transfer, which increases genetic diversity.

Bacteriophages (phages)

Opinions differ on whether viruses are a form of life or organic structures that interact with living organisms. They are considered by some to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly, and evolve through natural selection. However, they lack key characteristics such as a cellular structure generally considered necessary to count as life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as replicators and as "organisms at the edge of life".

Bacteriophages, often just called phages, are viruses that parasite bacteria and archaea. Marine phages parasite marine bacteria and archaea, such as cyanobacteria. They are a common and diverse group of viruses and are the most abundant biological entity in marine environments, because their hosts, bacteria, are typically the numerically dominant cellular life in the sea. Generally, there are about 1 million to 10 million viruses in each mL of seawater, or about ten times more double-stranded DNA viruses than there are cellular organisms, although estimates of viral abundance in seawater can vary over a wide range. Tailed bacteriophages appear to dominate marine ecosystems in the number and diversity of organisms. Bacteriophages belonging to the families Corticoviridae, Inoviridae, and Microviridae are also known to infect diverse marine bacteria.

Microorganisms make up about 70% of the marine biomass. It is estimated viruses kill 20% of this biomass each day and that there are 15 times as many viruses in the oceans as there are bacteria and archaea. Viruses are the main agents responsible for the rapid destruction of harmful algal blooms, which often kill other marine life. The number of viruses in the oceans decreases further offshore and deeper into the water, where there are fewer host organisms.

There are also archaean viruses that replicate within archaea: these are double-stranded DNA viruses with unusual and sometimes unique shapes. These viruses have been studied in most detail in the thermophilic archaea, particularly the orders Sulfolobales and Thermoproteales.

Viruses are an important natural means of transferring genes between different species, which increases genetic diversity and drives evolution. It is thought that viruses played a central role in the early evolution, before the diversification of bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, at the time of the last universal common ancestor of life on Earth. Viruses are still one of the largest reservoirs of unexplored genetic diversity on Earth.

Marine bacteria

Bacteria constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometers in length, bacteria have a number of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals. Bacteria were among the first life forms to appear on Earth, and are present in most of its habitats. Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, and the deep portions of Earth's crust. Bacteria also live in symbiotic and parasitic relationships with plants and animals.

Once regarded as plants constituting the class Schizomycetes, bacteria are now classified as prokaryotes. Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do not contain a nucleus and rarely harbor membrane-bound organelles. Although the term bacteria traditionally included all prokaryotes, the scientific classification changed after the discovery in the 1990s that prokaryotes consist of two very different groups of organisms that evolved from an ancient common ancestor. These evolutionary domains are called Bacteria and Archaea.

The ancestors of modern bacteria were unicellular microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear on Earth, about 4 billion years ago. For about 3 billion years, most organisms were microscopic, and bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms of life. Although bacterial fossils exist, such as stromatolites, their lack of distinctive morphology prevents them from being used to examine the history of bacterial evolution, or to date the time of origin of a particular bacterial species. However, gene sequences can be used to reconstruct the bacterial phylogeny, and these studies indicate that bacteria diverged first from the archaeal/eukaryotic lineage. Bacteria were also involved in the second great evolutionary divergence, that of the archaea and eukaryotes. Here, eukaryotes resulted from the entering of ancient bacteria into endosymbiotic associations with the ancestors of eukaryotic cells, which were themselves possibly related to the Archaea. This involved the engulfment by proto-eukaryotic cells of alphaproteobacterial symbionts to form either mitochondria or hydrogenosomes, which are still found in all known Eukarya. Later on, some eukaryotes that already contained mitochondria also engulfed cyanobacterial-like organisms. This led to the formation of chloroplasts in algae and plants. There are also some algae that originated from even later endosymbiotic events. Here, eukaryotes engulfed eukaryotic algae that developed into a "second-generation" plastid. This is known as secondary endosymbiosis.


Marine micro animals

As juveniles, animals develop from microscopic stages, which can include spores, eggs, and larvae. At least one microscopic animal group, the parasitic cnidarian Myxozoa, is unicellular in its adult form and includes marine species. Other adults marine micro animals are multicellular. Microscopic adult arthropods are more commonly found inland in freshwater, but there are marine species as well. Microscopic adult marine crustaceans include some copepods, cladoceran, and tardigrades (water bears). Some marine nematodes and rotifers are also too small to be recognized with the naked eye, as are many Porifera, including the recently discovered anaerobic species that spend their lives in an anoxic environment. Copepods contribute more to the secondary productivity and carbon sink of the world's oceans than any other group of organisms.

Origin of animals

The earliest animals were marine invertebrates, that is, vertebrates came later. Animals are multicellular eukaryotes and are distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls. Marine invertebrates are animals that inhabit a marine environment apart from the vertebrate members of the chordate phylum; invertebrates lack a vertebral column. Some have evolved a shell or a hard exoskeleton.

The earliest animal fossils may belong to the genus Dickinsonia, 571 million to 541 million years ago. Individual Dickinsonia typically resembles a bilaterally symmetrical ribbed oval. They kept growing until they were covered with sediment or otherwise killed and spent most of their lives with their bodies firmly anchored to the sediment. Their taxonomic affinities are presently unknown, but their mode of growth is consistent with a bilaterian affinity.

Apart from Dickinsonia, the earliest widely accepted animal fossils are the rather modern-looking cnidarians (the group that includes coral, jellyfish, sea anemones, and Hydra), possibly from around 580 Ma The Ediacaran biota, which flourished for the last 40 million years before the start of the Cambrian was the first animal more than a very few centimeters long. Like Dickinsonia, many were flat with a "quilted" appearance, and seemed so strange that there was a proposal to classify them as a separate kingdom, Vendozoa. Others, however, have been interpreted as early mollusks (Kimberella), echinoderms (Arkarua), and arthropods (Spriggina, Parvancorina). There is still debate about the classification of these specimens, mainly because the diagnostic features which allow taxonomists to classify more recent organisms, such as similarities to living organisms, are generally absent in the Ediacarans. However, there seems little doubt that Kimberella was at least a triploblastic bilaterian animal, in other words, an animal significantly more complex than the cnidarians.

Small shelly fauna is a very mixed collection of fossils found between the Late Ediacaran and Middle Cambrian periods. The earliest, Cloudina, shows signs of successful defense against predation and may indicate the start of an evolutionary arms race. Some tiny Early Cambrian shells almost certainly belonged to mollusks, while the owners of some "armor plates," Halkieria and Microdictyon, were eventually identified when more complete specimens were found in Cambrian lagerstätten preserved soft-bodied animals.