What is a very rare micro-organism?

Question: What is a very rare micro-organism?
- Keywords:
  microorganism
Asked by funsunshine to Debbie, Glyn, Jon, Kat on 20 Mar 2013.
- Jonathan Stone answered on 20 Mar 2013:
  
  Good question…I am sure that @glyn and @debbie know of a few…!
- Kathryn McMahon answered on 20 Mar 2013:
  
  These cave bacteria sound pretty rare:
  http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2012/04/120411-drug-resistance-bacteria-caves-diseases-human-health-science/
  To find rare micro-organisms, you need to go somewhere thats pretty isolated or unusual as bacteria and other micro-organisms spread very easily as they are so small. So you need to go somewhere like caves deep underground, or water trapped under miles of ice (like Lake Vostok, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21709225).
  My favourite unusual micro-organism is the whiskey mould. This only grows where you have whiskey or alcohol distilleries – it likes the alcohol in the air around the factory. Its not rare as there a lot of whiskey distilleries around the world (I saw some in scotland last summer!), but it is pretty weird, you can see it coating houses and trees.
  http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_angelsshare/
  
  http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_angelsshare/
- Glyn Barrett answered on 20 Mar 2013:
  
  Hi funsunshine!
  Very good question and quite difficult to answer. The problem with micro-organisms is that there are so many of them making it almost impossible to find the really rare ones. Did you know that in one gram of soil that you might dig up in your garden or in the forest there could be up to 10000 different species of bacteria! To contrast this number there are less than 6000 species of mammals in the whole world! That is incredible and makes working with micro-organisms really difficult but great fun as well.
  
  Micro-organisms form symbiotic relationships or in other words become really close friends with other species on the planet like mammals or plants or insects for example. Some bacteria form these friendships with deep sea sponges and with nothing else. Some deep sponge species are really really rare so I guess that means that their friendly bacteria buddies are really rare as well.
  
  It is important that these deep sea sponges are protected as they are very delicate and easily damaged by fish harvesting methods like bottom trawling. If you save one species, you can save a load of others.
- Debbie Crockard answered on 20 Mar 2013:
  
  I suppose deep sea hydrothermal vent micro-organisms are pretty rare – simply because they are so specialised and only live in particular places. But they are very important to those communities that live there (but there are still billions of them!)

Question: What is a very rare micro-organism?

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