Detecting a series of healthy living organisms that do not need oxygen, light

A creature lurking in the ocean has broken all the rules of life by surviving in an environment with almost no oxygen. They still breathe, by making their own oxygen without the need for light.

The deep ocean contains creatures that break all the rules of life

It was a new species of bacteria, named Nitrosopumilus maritimus, with several relatives collectively known as ammonia oxidizing archaea (AOA). They can survive in the dark environment of the ocean floor and lack of oxygen thanks to a way of self-producing oxygen not found in any other species in the world.

Microbiologist Beate Kraft from the University of Southern Denmark told Science Alert: "They're really abundant in the oceans, playing an important role in the nitrogen cycle. So they need oxygen, but they don't. where they live there is no and no light to produce oxygen through photosynthesis. Are they some kind of ghost cell?"

They collected swarms of mysterious creatures from deep ocean water samples to find a way to answer the question. They have seen mysterious bacteria "breathe" freely of all the oxygen present in the water, only to soon be flooded with oxygen again.

This offset oxygen is very different from the photosynthetic oxygen we know.

Digging deeper, they discovered that they were converting ammonia (NH3) to nitrite (NO2) by the mysterious miracles inside their small bodies. That means oxygen comes from their bodies and not from any other source!