Coral reefs are hot spots for more than fish.
Fish and corals in reefs across the Pacific Ocean may harbor nearly 3 million varieties of bacteria, researchers report June 1 in Nature Communications.
That means scientists are vastly underestimating Earth’s microbiome, microbiologist Pierre Galand of Sorbonne University in Paris said at a May 31 news conference. The new count of bacteria living in the Pacific Ocean’s coral reefs alone falls within current estimates for the total microbial diversity of Earth, suggesting that there exponentially more bacteria living on the planet than previously thought.
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