Anaerobic animals from the sea floor.

[LongTomH]

No, it's not a Japanese horror flick, these are tiny, truly anaerobic animals found deep in the Mediterranean. I got this from the Scientific Activist's blog.

This is pretty neat: scientists have apparently discovered the first example of truly anaerobic animal life (i.e. an animal that can survive in the absence of oxygen). This isn't some sort of fuzzy critter, though; instead, these are tiny (less than 1 mm in length) animals that were found on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. The animals belong to the phylum Loricifera (see illustration below). Significantly, these animals lack mitochondria, the sub-cellular organelles where oxygen is employed to produce ATP in aerobic (oxygen-dependent) life.

[Deep13]

1. cool. nt

[FSogol]

2. Micro-Cthulu? So, Lovercraft was right except about size?

[Sal Minella]

3. "Atmosphere capable of supporting life" is what we keep looking for,

but as Carl Sagan said, when we send sensors into space looking for scrambled eggs, and the sensors report zero hits, we tend to say "Nope, nothing out there."

Several years back, in the ocean west of Africa, a bacterial form was found that was nitrogen-based instead of carbon-based, iirc.

Our comprehension is astonishingly narrow, considering the endless permutations of everything around us.