Nearly 350 years ago, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek needed a homemade microscope to see bacteria that floated in a single drop of rainwater. A study published in Science yesterday (June 23) now documents a bacterium that doesn’t require such a device to be seen: Thiomargarita magnifica, or “magnificent sulfur pearl,” which was first sampled in the swampy, sulfurous waters surrounding a mangrove forest in the Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe. It’s the largest bacterium found to date.
“It is orders of magnitude bigger than what we thought was the maximum possible size for a single bacterium,” Jean-Marie Volland, a marine biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and study coauthor, tells Reuters. “They are about the same size and shape of an eyelash.”
When study coauthor Olivier Gros, a biologist at the University of the French West Indies and Guiana, first saw the spaghetti-like organism clinging to submerged mangrove leaves, he thought ...
