Small Wonder

    Steven Jay Gould once quipped that talking about the Age of Dinosaurs, the Age of Reptiles etc was nonsense “it’s been the Age of Bacteria from the beginning and still is”.
    The over-production of fixed nitrogen by humans and its overabundance in many natural marine systems has led to more and more monitoring of nitrogen in water. Measuring ammonia in aquarium water led Stahl and others to wonder what was turning ammonia into nitrite (the first step in eliminating it by converting it back to nitrogen gas) so quickly. Bacteria are the usual suspects but they could not find them in quantities high enough to account for all the activity.
    They finally tracked it down to an Archaen. an ancient bacterium, that was very difficult to grow in lab cultures and very hard to isolate in pure cultures. They finally succeeded and showed them to be the responsible organisms. They and others are now looking for the same effects in fresh water and soil.
     —Nature 437 p.543-6