So I haven’t managed to get around to writing the post I had bee. . . look! Shiny! Spirochetes!
"Treats? Where!?" The social bacterium Treponema pallidum. (Subtle, very subtle)
This one goes out to those of you who think all bacteria are either boring rods or balls. (BTW, is it just me, or does this video have a strange first-moon-landing-recording-esque quality?)
Eat your heart out, physicists, engineers and animal behaviorists — you can’t say you’re not impressed here. Wave forms? Relaxation pattern? Forward and reverse? Not bad for a tidy .5 x 5-250 micrometer package. In case it’s still not clear, spirochetes (spy’-row-keets) are helical bacteria, and one of their members is the infamous Borrelia burgdorferi, the party behind Lyme Disease, the species in the video above. So is Treponema pallidum, the maker of Syphillis (TM). That’s right. Don’t mess with the ‘chetes.
Well. . . maybe not. In spite of what you might think from our highly skewed sample size of 2, most spirochetes are not nasty human parasites. They are free-living, oxygen-avoiding, bread-winning, welfare-eschewing bacteria. Incidentally, Spirochetes represent a happy accident of taxonomy. In the old days, microbes often got classified by shape. So all the spirochetes got lumped together. Turns out that actually reflects true kinship in this case. Lucky us! At least one taxon we don’t have to split and relearn!
For a look at all the groups of Eubacteria spirochetes are related to, click here. Once there, you can click on “Spirochetes” for a look at some of the specific genera in the group.
Thank you, YouTube, for making such wonders freely available to us all . . .
