Bacteria
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Keshav Sawmy, Grade 5
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Short Story
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2015
Bacteria
Hi, my name is keshav Sawmy and I come from Mauritius. My dad is diplomat and got a posting to Australia. I have a twin brother and a big sister and we all go to Telopea Park School. I have always been interested in science and engineering. I will be writing a story on bacteria.
A bacteria constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a number of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spiral. Bacteria are tiny living beings (microorganisms) - they are neither plants nor animals - they belong to a group all by themselves. Bacteria are tiny single-cell microorganisms, usually a few micrometers in length that normally exist together in millions.
A gram of soil typically contains about 40 million bacterial cells. A milliliter of fresh water usually holds about one million bacterial cells.
Planet Earth is estimated to hold at least 5 nonillion bacteria. Scientists say that much of Earth's biomass is made up of bacteria.
5 nonillion = 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Normally people would say that bacteria’s are bad for us and they give us fevers or a cold but what we don’t know is that they were actually one of the first form of life on Earth.
Not the first but I’m pretty sure that they were the second from of life on Earth. Before the Big Bang, the average colour of the universe was actually Beige. The history of life on Earth began about 3.8 billion years ago, initially with single-celled prokaryotic cells, such as bacteria. Multicellular life evolved over a billion years later and it's only in the last 570 million years that the kind of life forms we are familiar with began to evolve, starting with arthropods, followed by fish 530 million years ago (Ma), land plants 475Ma and forests 385Ma. Mammals didn't evolve until 200Ma and our own species, Homo sapiens, only 200,000 years ago. So humans have been around for a mere 0.004% of the Earth's history.
So people might think that bacteria is bad but they have done a lot to the Earth.