Wed, 03 Nov 2004 16:50:07 +0000 Dan Holdsworth wrote:



As far can be told, the first bacteria did not use light in their
reactions, and were effectively entirely "rockeaters". Then at some
point a strain evolved that could combine elemental sulphur and hydrogen
from the atmosphere to produce energy, albeit inefficiently.


So tell me, do the Rockeaters and the Strain-Rockeaters mentioned need each
other in order to live, survive and thrive?



The big breakthrough came when a variant on this strain started to use
light to push the reaction in the other direction: it took the then
fairly abundant hydrogen sulphide and produced elemental sulphur and
hydrogen.

Same question, do the light-variant H2, S need the reverse strain co-existing
in the environment?



Neither of these bacterial types altered the atmosphere much, however.
That came with a small mutation in the genes that coded for the H2S
splitting enzyme.

The mutant form split water instead of hydrogen sulphide. This produces

That poses a question as to how much of a interrelation is water to hydrogen
sulphide for the Rockeaters and strains as they produce energy. I guess I am
asking whether you can have Rockeaters in dry rock conditions. So could you
have Rockeaters on the Moon where there is little to no water.

So how much water does any Rockeater need to have interfacing in order to use
hydrogen sulfur?


oxygen, which was then rather troublesome for the bacteria since
everything alive then was poisoned by oxygen. Gradually a more tolerant
strain evolved, and true plant-like behaviour took over. The oxygen

So the question here becomes as a mirror image of the above only instead of
revolving around hydrogen sulphur it revolves around CO2 and O2.

If the Rockeaters of hydrogen-sulfur have variants that go reverse, implies
then that animals to plants is the reverse for carbon-oxygen gas


levels at first stayed low through weathering of rocks and iron
minerals, then eventually took off exponentially.

The relevent point here is, where do you draw the line? What IS a plant?
The hydrogen sulphide reducers are acting like plants, but the compounds
they're reducing are rock-derived.

I was focused on Plant Kingdom to Animal Kingdom but perhaps that should not
have been my focus but rather instead a focus on energy pathways of gases or
elemental compounds and that these special pathways have dual reverses where
one creature species will emerge to use one direction of hydrogen and sulfur
and another creature species will emerge to use the reverse pathway.

And that somehow both creature species needs the other in order to live and
thrive but how they "necessarily need" one another is unclear.



The relationship of plants to animals today is that animals depend on
plants for food but plants depend on animals for fertilizer.

So I need a relationship between blue green algae and some other
organism.

How's about a relation between photosynthetic predatory protozoa and
other photosynthetic predatory protozoa?

Down at the microscopic level, with bacteria and protozoa, the
plant/animal dividing line is extremely blurred. An organism might one
day be wholly photosynthetic; it might the next be 50/50
photosynthetic/predatory; it might then become a predator for a brief while.


Maybe I need to focus more on energy pathways such as hydrogen-sulfur or
carbon-oxygen and see if there are two creature species always present when
such an energy pathway exists and whether both species are vital to one another
for each to live and thrive.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies