UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, APRIL 2013Nature is not just red in tooth and claw but white with apatite, golden with chrysophyte algae, purple with photosynthetic plastids, and peachy orange with carotenoids eaten by long-legged filter-feeding flamingos, whose diet of shrimp and algae and cyanobacteria shows up under their skin. It is butterscotch gold with naturally archiving, insect-preserving amber, white with Beggiatoa bacteria, and black with the magnetic teeth of chitons. It is green with Chlorobium sulfur bacteria and red with Chromatium, a purple sulfur bacterium that, like its ancient metabolic brethren, oxidizes sulfide rather than water, yellow sulfur rather than oxygen as its photosynthetic waste. Nature is not just dog-eat-dog but bacteria-inside-archaeon, protest mingling with protist, a quorum-sensing swarm. There is more in it than we dreamed; it comes in colors and keeps on coming, psychedelically without pause or apology.
The night is black and the sky is blue. The sky is blue because of life. It is blue because of oxygen atoms released billions of years ago by green cyanobacteria. Exuberant and dangerous, they spread, poisoning the planet with their toxic oxic pollution. They were the first to be victimized and among the first to be transformed, forced as they were to evolve ways to tolerate and eventually make use of the life-produced reactive gas.
Why is the sky blue, no-longer-jumping Jack asks. A correct answer would be cyanobacteria, the mean lean greens that give summer its verdant sheen. The sky would not be its beautiful aqua or azure, the oceans would not reflect the sky’s blue kiss without these germs. For the sky’s ...
