Cyanide filled California lake hiding creatures inside

Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra Nevada is home to an organism that has never been observed before. Researchers have found an unidentified microscopic organism in the body of water that may hold clues to the origins of complex animal life on Earth. It is related to animals and is a kind of single-celled microbe known as a choanoflagellate.

Discovery of the unknown

The fact that the organisms discovered in the lake and terrestrial animals share an ancestor underscores the significance of this finding in numerous ways. The goal of science is to comprehend the process by which single-celled life gave way to multicellular life.

Co-author Nicole King told Newsweek, “I’m fascinated by the origin of animals, but it turns out that you can’t really study it from the fossil record because the first animals were small and squishy.” At UC Berkeley, he teaches molecular and cell biology. Although “no one was studying them,” he continued, choanoflagellates have been identified as “the closest living relatives of animals.”

King notes that “choanos” can form multicellular colonies, much to what happened in the early phases of animal embryonic development in the study published online in the journal mBio. They can therefore be useful in comprehending prehistoric evolutionary processes.

Mono lake is conditioned inhospitable

According to King, “only the hardiest of extremophiles” can live at Mono Lake due to its hostile environment. “Mono lake is hypersaline; I think it has three times the salinity of the ocean and is hyperalkaline,” stated King. “It also contains high levels of toxins, including cyanide.”

But now that the organism has been found, the water offers much more. There are intriguing ways in which the choanoflagellate Barroeca monosierra interacts with bacteria.A particularly fascinating one is the abrupt transformation of a single-celled organism into a multicellular one. “Certain bacteria can cause them to switch from being single-celled to multicellular,” added King.

Choanos can also mate because of bacteria. According to King, the fact that they abruptly leave their lonely, asexual life and unite with these molecules acts as an aphrodisiac for the creature.