An international team of researchers has discovered a new strain of cyanobacteria that absorbs CO2 and then quickly sinks to the ocean floor, dubbing this round and heavy find as the Chonkus.
About Chonkus
- Chonkus was discovered in the shallow sunlit waters off the coast of Italy’s Vulcano Island, where volcanic gas-rich groundwater seeps into the sea.
- The waters collected from those seeps turned out to contain a spontaneous mutant strain of Synechococcus elongatus, a species of photosynthesizing bacteria that’s at the base of ocean food webs around the world.
- According to researchers, Chonkus are particularly effective at carbon sequestration in the ocean, the researchers suggest.
- Not only might it have the capacity to absorb a lot more carbon than the average cyanobacteria floating in the ocean, but it also sinks rapidly, which means it could also sequester that carbon away from the atmosphere quickly.
About Cyanobacteria
- Cyanobacteria, formerly known as blue-green algae, are photosynthetic microscopic organisms that are technically bacteria.
- They were originally called blue-green algae because dense growths often turn the water green, blue-green or brownish-green.
- Cyanobacteria are aquatic and photosynthetic, that is, they live in the water, and can manufacture their own food.
- Because they are bacteria, they are quite small and usually unicellular, though they often grow in colonies large enough to see.
- They have the distinction of being the oldest known fossils, more than 3.5 billion years old, in fact!
- The cyanobacteria are still around; they are one of the largest and most important groups of bacteria on earth.
