They were even the first life on the planet, living without oxygen in an ancient ocean.
Microbes live in some of the most extreme environments, from boiling hydrothermal vents to underground glacial lakes in the Antarctic. Many are also the keepers of healthy ecosystems, cleaning the ocean of waste and often defending against disease rather than spreading it. Microbes are often the engines of ecosystems that otherwise would not have access to the food and nutrients they need. Just because these microbes can’t be seen does not mean they are unimportant. If you weighed all the living organisms in the ocean, 90 percent of that weight would be from microbes. They include bacteria, viruses, archaea, protists, and fungi.
Invisible to the naked eye, there is a teeming world of microbes living in the ocean with a complexity and diversity that rivals all other life on Earth.
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