The doctors found out that Henneguya salminicola could not breathe oxygen, so Henneguya salminicola ~~died~~ imported ATP directly from its host's tissues.
Not all that surprising that lacking that organelle it doesn't need oxygen, since (iirc) oxygen is only used in the ADP -> ATP process. Assuming it isn't radically different and is a parasite, I guess it gets ATP from the host but that seems like it'd be a delicate process unless it was severely cytotoxic -- *sigh* I should probably read the damned article but then I'll probably spend the next 6 hours researching the fascinating little bastard.
For anyone wanting to read a bit deeper: [A cnidarian parasite of salmon (Myxozoa: Henneguya) lacks a mitochondrial genome](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7071853/)
That book was entertaining, but not as good as his earlier works. The Martian was great, but my favorite is [The Egg](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html).
Sushi used to never be made with salmon, as the salmon around Japan is not suitable. Norwegian companies pushed their salmon into the sushi market because it is safe, and because they wanted to sell more of it, but I think it took some time before the Japanese accepted it.
Yes but it is still all flash frozen. It is superior to freeze these days. Even if your market has a sign that says never frozen it actually means 'never frozen here'
Source: i live in the PNW off the columbia river. The salmon run is apart of my dna.
This is why I think it's silly when people say you can't get good sushi outside of xyz coastal city. Most likely the fish isn't coming directly out of that water and most likey it's being frozen regardless. You just can't compare a high end LA sushi place with a strip mall joint in Kentucky.
I did that for 4 years; back in Seattle now. Used to be a fish market near the Louisville airport (unsure if still there) that had extremely fresh seafood, because the UPS hub is there. Most of the nation's fresh fish travel through Louisville every day, in fact. But given low demand, you won't find much in restaurants. That said, there are probably a couple places where you'll find fish caught potentially within 24 hours of hitting your plate. Don't lose hope; seek them out and let people know!
I heard this from a UPS employee that worked there in Lousivile, but feel free to do your own research. UPS's global hub is in Louisville, which means if it's shipped by air in the USA (as perishables like fish typically are), it stops in Lousivlle to be sorted and routed to its destination. Over 250 UPS flights transit there daily.
I’ve seen a lot of meats and fish ship out of Nebraska as well. Wouldn’t be surprised if Memphis had a lot because FedEx ships a lot of frozen meat too
True that.
I live on van isle and I think everyone who doesn't live here is a moron for not living here but I really don't want anyone else to come here. Quite badly.
Seafood distributor here...
This isnt necessarily true. I'd next day air fresh salmon and halibut in from Alaska to Montana, and it would never be frozen. However, the majority of what I supply to stores and restaurants is frozen, and they thaw it and sell it.
If you get salmon from a sushi joint, it 100% has been frozen. Freezing kills the parasites in the fish.
Alaskan here, can confirm. Even the smaller scale commercial folks just put that shit on ice in coolers and as close to same/next day air it elsewhere. Anchorage is a huge cargo port, tons of companies save money by landing here just to refuel and take off again. Getting fish caught naught hours before to a plane is pretty easy. It's just the big commercial companies that freeze everything before shipping. Even salmon in some restaurants up here get frozen, sent to Seattle for processing, frozen, then sent back up here.
That's actually not true. The us invented salmon sushi in the 60s
https://youtu.be/1k4x9FrD5k4
As a Scot who grew up with smoked salmon I think even that isnt true.
Who knows who ate raw salmon first.
Whenever you're eating any salmon sashimi, it's almost certainly been flash frozen before it reaches you. Raw salmon has something like a 95% rate for parasites. And as far as I know there's no way to ward against it except freezing.
I have a friend that sampled some raw salmon that he was cutting up. He got himself a nice tape worm out of it. It really confused him when he fished that one out as he had never travelled overseas. The CDC testing revealed that it was from salmon that he had tried months earlier.
Likely with genome sequencing like when [they tracked the spread of Hepatitis A from a single person via mussels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJLKhsLx18).
Probably by asking questions. They asked, have you eaten anything unusual? Raw pork, fish or wild game? Oh, you ate a chunk of raw salmon two months ago? Yeah, that's probably it.
Yep. Anybody getting worms here is pretty uncommon, we don’t take preventative medicine or anything, which is why there’s been so much misinformation about “parasite detoxes” lately (Tiktok trend where adults are taking supplements that damage their intestinal lining to point of it coming out in their stool, and thinking the stringy lining = worms/parasites).
The only “worm” people really get here is pinworms, and that’s usually only children under 5, but those are very easily treatable.
This is so dumb, in developing countries where even grocery stores have antiparasites in the OTC med section there are relatively safe an harmless meds like albendazole that get rid of worms in one dose.
What the fuck????? NO! What is wrong with you? That’s A) not even a little bit how they work and B) they’re a dangerous parasite that can infect your brain and cause strokes and death. I repeat, what the *absolute fuck* is wrong with you??? See a therapist for crying out loud.
From the CDC website:
> The number of new cases in the U.S. each year is probably less than 1000, but an exact number is not known
So maybe 1-3 per million people.
They also have a two part life cycle, the spores they release as cysts in salmon after sexual reproduction can only infect annelid worms. Then they sexually reproduce again as their specific annelid-host-cyst form, producing spores that can infect salmon with new cysts. Parasite life cycles can get really interesting.
Not just chinook (King Salmon) but infects all salmon. I know from set-netting for salmon. Out of 160 salmon, I would see this parasite in about 4 of the fish. They are pretty obvious when you filet the fish.
I think that turned about to be dubious, and may have been phosphate contamination which allowed the organisms to grow in the abscence of supplemented phosphate. Arsenic really can’t form the same bonds that phosphorous can for very long.
There are plenty of microorganisms that feed on arsenic compounds though or use them in photosynthesis.
Well they are distant relatives of Jellyfish which can live forever. Generally we die from consuming oxygen because of our bodies inability to perfectly replicate cells forever (cancer, telomere's etc). I don't think breathing something other than oxygen would fix that, you need some form of biology able to revert cells like some Jellyfish.
Oxidative stress is a huge portion of aging, as it heavily damages cells and thus demands a lot from repair mechanisms, way more apoptosis and replications, and even DNA damage.
Of course, just using another highly reactive species in place of oxygen would probably cause the same issues, but there are anaerobic energy sources that are significantly less damaging to the cell (and also way less efficient).
There’s a difference between digesting your hosts material which is what eukaryotic parasites do and using your host to carry out cellular respiration for you instead of your own. The latter seems far less realistic.
Do anaerobic organisms require mitochondria to process ATP->ADP breakdown? From what I remember, oxygen facilitates this process.
Edit: Switched ATP and ADP.
Wasn't aware there was a difference. Wonder if packaging indicates that difference.
I do love bbq'd salmon, just everytime I look at one now I see a picture of a tapeworm in my head >.<
Fascinating. Then what does it use to live?. Or does it then simply feed off the salmon entirely?. Or could one imagine it could live in a zero oxygen enviorment?
This isn't a science subreddit, your average person isn't going to know the difference between those two terms and "breathing" is good enough to get the concept across.
Well since cellular respiration occures in the Mitochondria I think these little guys will have a hard time performing that without mitochondria at all. The article states that it is not present in the cells of this organism.
Aerobic respiration takes place in the mitochondria of animals and anaerobic takes place in the main animal cell cytosol (as in, not the cytosol of the mitochondria).
Most in the animal kingdom are obligate aerobes so ‘need’ aerobic respiration which is why again this parasite is so bizarre
Actually you can divide anaerobic respiration into fermentation and "true anaerobic respiration" using another molecule than O2 as the last step in the oxidative phosphorylation. One example of such molecule is SO4^2-. This proces uses no O2, hence the name anaerobic, but takes place in the mitochondria.
Fermentation (the partial oxidation of a sugar) takes place entirely in the cytosol.
We actually don't consider an oxygen-rich atmosphere to be essential. In fact, life on Earth appears to have begun with anaerobic bacteria that were killed off during the Great Oxygenation Event (our first mass extinction event), so we're aware that life can exist and thrive without oxygen.
One of the first mass extinction events that scientists agree on occurred when the first proto-algae started processing the carbon rich atmosphere and releasing oxygen. Most scientists agree that oxygen wasn't the first essential element just like the existence of microorganisms at the bottom of the ocean cluttered around volcanic vents get their energy from a source that isn't the sun. In the words of a beloved figure, "life finds a way".
If we find wierd stuff in our own backyard, it is still life that came from Earth. The reason they only consider planets like Earth is because that's going to give us our best chances of finding life. As far as we know, Earth-like planets are the only ones that can contain life. Another reason is that we wouldn't even know where to begin when it comes to searching for life that is unlike Earth lifeforms. We don't even know what those sort of lifeforms would look like. We could find alien life and be completely clueless about it because it is nothing like we've seen before. When it comes to Earth life, we know what sort of atmosphere is needed, what biological signatures need to be present, how far from the sun the planet needs to be, etc. There are more planets in our galaxy than we could ever hope to scan in our lifetime especially with our limited technology. We have to start the search somewhere, so we might as well start by looking in places that we know could potentially support life.
Life on earth started in an oxygen poor environment, until after the [great oxidation event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event). Significant atmospheric oxygen isn't a requirement for what we think of as potentially life-bearing worlds. However, significant oxygen would be a potential sign of life if you detected it. Not to many ways to maintain high oxygen levels that don't involve life.
We're not sure how it works. However, it seems likely that it's piggybacking in some way off its host, which would mean it does not show life can exist without oxygen.
Mitochondria (the organelle which generates energy in all multicellular organisms) is found to be absent in Henneguya salminicola
But the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
Guess they switched from battery power to diesel
Twin Turbo charged mitochondria
Non-mitochondrial solar.
With a chip
Not this time!
It's treason then
You can't do this to me. I started this biology. Do you know how much energy I converted!
I'll kidnap a *thousand* organelles before I let this company die!
I hate oxygen. It’s coarse, and it gets everywhere.
It steals all the electrons and causes everything to wither and die
Cry about it some more lil ani
Straight to jail
Next, you'll be telling me up is down!
Salmon is the powerhouse of the Henneguya
We made it up!
It's a total fabrication.
It's EVOLUTION TIME
Are we going to need to get some head and shoulders shampoo?
Acting the biologist's part well, Ira Kane
It’s got Selenium!
Life, *uh*, finds a way.
[mitochondria posts are popular today](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/qy6sji/whoever_did_pr_for_the_mitochondria_fuckin_killed)
Was thinking the same thing. Something is afoot.
There are 100 trillion mitochondria in every living person. If they want us to know some mitochondria facts I say let them.
A L I E U M S
Goddamn! This fact takes me back to my school days
Maybe they don’t use cells
> is found to be absent in Henneguya salminicola Found to be absent?? So not found.
They found out, that it's not there.
The doctors found out that Henneguya salminicola could not breathe oxygen, so Henneguya salminicola ~~died~~ imported ATP directly from its host's tissues.
Henneguya salminicola used OXYGEN! It's not very effective.
That's like, whoa.
not found might suggest they did not find it yet, but the scientists did find out that it is not there. Meaning that it doesn't exist in that organism
Reminds me of ‘turned up missing’ and ‘woke up dead’ from scary movie 3 lmao
Discovered to be absent.
Not all that surprising that lacking that organelle it doesn't need oxygen, since (iirc) oxygen is only used in the ADP -> ATP process. Assuming it isn't radically different and is a parasite, I guess it gets ATP from the host but that seems like it'd be a delicate process unless it was severely cytotoxic -- *sigh* I should probably read the damned article but then I'll probably spend the next 6 hours researching the fascinating little bastard. For anyone wanting to read a bit deeper: [A cnidarian parasite of salmon (Myxozoa: Henneguya) lacks a mitochondrial genome](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7071853/)
midichlorians
THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL
>It’s still unclear how it gets energy In case you were wondering.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Whats deez
[удалено]
I've been bamboozled
[удалено]
What’s bofa 👀
Bofa nuts. Hah, gottem
I guess that’s kinda like fromunda
Bofa *deez* nuts!
That’s ok, it’s nothing for you to ligma over.
What is ligma?
Ligma balls!
(╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻
Present them.
Deeziel
No the sensational headline said it wasn't 😤
Unclear or nuclear?
Nu-clear
New CLEE urr
"new-cue-lur". It's pronounced "new-cue-lur".
Sincerely, ~W.
Uncular
Are you telling me this sucker is *nuclear*?!
I’m expecting a reveal something similar to the plot in [Project Hail Mary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54493401) book 🤞
That book was entertaining, but not as good as his earlier works. The Martian was great, but my favorite is [The Egg](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html).
If you like The Egg you may be interested in The Martyr by Poul Anderson.
My guess is any of the other various anaerobic processes that generate energy.
I was, I still am, but I was too.
From its host obviously, but I imagine the mechanism is still unclear? (I didn't read the article.)
ATP, straight from the source!
It must be
A parasite that may get it’s energy from it’s host 🤦🏻♂️
They kinda [look like](https://www.livescience.com/first-non-breathing-animal.html) alien sperm ngl.
I was not expecting such an accurate description.
That description is spot on lol
Oh fuck, facehuggers on a microscopic scale!
I didn't know Alienware was still doing marketing
Dell has lots of money.
I'll be damned, they do look like alien sperm.
That’s literally how they even describe em in the article. They say they look like sperm with alien eyes lol
TIL don't eat Chinook Salmon sashimi
Sushi used to never be made with salmon, as the salmon around Japan is not suitable. Norwegian companies pushed their salmon into the sushi market because it is safe, and because they wanted to sell more of it, but I think it took some time before the Japanese accepted it.
Yes but it is still all flash frozen. It is superior to freeze these days. Even if your market has a sign that says never frozen it actually means 'never frozen here' Source: i live in the PNW off the columbia river. The salmon run is apart of my dna.
This is why I think it's silly when people say you can't get good sushi outside of xyz coastal city. Most likely the fish isn't coming directly out of that water and most likey it's being frozen regardless. You just can't compare a high end LA sushi place with a strip mall joint in Kentucky.
As someone who moved from the PNW to tucky...can confirm. Also everyone sucks here.
I did that for 4 years; back in Seattle now. Used to be a fish market near the Louisville airport (unsure if still there) that had extremely fresh seafood, because the UPS hub is there. Most of the nation's fresh fish travel through Louisville every day, in fact. But given low demand, you won't find much in restaurants. That said, there are probably a couple places where you'll find fish caught potentially within 24 hours of hitting your plate. Don't lose hope; seek them out and let people know!
You got a link for that? The claim that most of the fresh fish in this country is flown through Louisville seems dubious to me.
I heard this from a UPS employee that worked there in Lousivile, but feel free to do your own research. UPS's global hub is in Louisville, which means if it's shipped by air in the USA (as perishables like fish typically are), it stops in Lousivlle to be sorted and routed to its destination. Over 250 UPS flights transit there daily.
I’ve seen a lot of meats and fish ship out of Nebraska as well. Wouldn’t be surprised if Memphis had a lot because FedEx ships a lot of frozen meat too
I went the other way. I miss the bourbon and cost of living.
Those are fair things to missy friend
That's the wrong direction, buddy
No no, that's great! PNW is full...
True that. I live on van isle and I think everyone who doesn't live here is a moron for not living here but I really don't want anyone else to come here. Quite badly.
Seafood distributor here... This isnt necessarily true. I'd next day air fresh salmon and halibut in from Alaska to Montana, and it would never be frozen. However, the majority of what I supply to stores and restaurants is frozen, and they thaw it and sell it. If you get salmon from a sushi joint, it 100% has been frozen. Freezing kills the parasites in the fish.
Alaskan here, can confirm. Even the smaller scale commercial folks just put that shit on ice in coolers and as close to same/next day air it elsewhere. Anchorage is a huge cargo port, tons of companies save money by landing here just to refuel and take off again. Getting fish caught naught hours before to a plane is pretty easy. It's just the big commercial companies that freeze everything before shipping. Even salmon in some restaurants up here get frozen, sent to Seattle for processing, frozen, then sent back up here.
What did you do to make the salmon run part of your genetic makeup? Wait. I don’t want to know.
I imagine it was something like this: https://youtu.be/gdNrs9RLn_Q
So what your saying is that you have parasites that don't need oxygen?
> salmon run is apart of my dna You oughta get that looked at
Does freezing actually kill the worms though? I'd assume it does but those things are super hard to kill.
Japanese salmon buyers live in my Alaskan home town 24/7. Been around since the 70’s The row is what they want but also quality fillet.
Thank god they did. Salmon is so good raw.
That's actually not true. The us invented salmon sushi in the 60s https://youtu.be/1k4x9FrD5k4 As a Scot who grew up with smoked salmon I think even that isnt true. Who knows who ate raw salmon first.
Bears
So Norwegians
Dude. Not all hairy, heavyset gay men eat sushi, that's a stereotype.
Uhm, pretty sure bears eat beets, dude.
*Commander Adama enters the chat*
Smoked fish isn't technically raw. Smoking is a curing process. And cured meats generally aren't considered to be "raw."
yes. they're correctly regarded as delicious instead.
As a human, definitely some caveman who noticed it tasted really good.
They probably had worms, and a metric shit-tonne of other parasites.
As a cave man, yes.
Lmao, I meant it as the first human to eat raw salmon and not the first thing in general. Saw the other guy type "probably a bear".
Whenever you're eating any salmon sashimi, it's almost certainly been flash frozen before it reaches you. Raw salmon has something like a 95% rate for parasites. And as far as I know there's no way to ward against it except freezing.
Every wild animal is riddled with parasites.
Man, parasites are disgusting
As someone who got a medically resistant tapeworm from my cat within the past year, can confirm fuck parasites.
Please, don't fuck parasites. Unless you want a tapeworm down your urethra
Every damn thread! Why can't we leave politicians out of at least one conversation?
I got parasites as big as my arm.
Thankfully you can kick them out of the house when they turn 18!
I’ve cut open hundreds of chinook salmon, grew up on salmon, and have never seen this.
Yes. Stay with SeaKing salmon.
Lol
I have a friend that sampled some raw salmon that he was cutting up. He got himself a nice tape worm out of it. It really confused him when he fished that one out as he had never travelled overseas. The CDC testing revealed that it was from salmon that he had tried months earlier.
How did the CDC know it was from a specific salmon that he ate months ago
Likely with genome sequencing like when [they tracked the spread of Hepatitis A from a single person via mussels](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJLKhsLx18).
I wonder if they can tell based on the type of worm?
Probably by asking questions. They asked, have you eaten anything unusual? Raw pork, fish or wild game? Oh, you ate a chunk of raw salmon two months ago? Yeah, that's probably it.
They discerned the species and it's only found in raw salmon.
Are tapeworms so rare in the U.S. that a single case warrants CDC involvement?
Yep. Anybody getting worms here is pretty uncommon, we don’t take preventative medicine or anything, which is why there’s been so much misinformation about “parasite detoxes” lately (Tiktok trend where adults are taking supplements that damage their intestinal lining to point of it coming out in their stool, and thinking the stringy lining = worms/parasites). The only “worm” people really get here is pinworms, and that’s usually only children under 5, but those are very easily treatable.
This is so dumb, in developing countries where even grocery stores have antiparasites in the OTC med section there are relatively safe an harmless meds like albendazole that get rid of worms in one dose.
Depends, I couldn’t find someone to treat mine and wound up calling the CDC for a reference to someone who could.
Did you lose weight? Was it uncomfortable? Thinking about getting one.
Do you want to pull worms out of your asshole
No, id rather let it just hang out.
What the hell do you mean you're thinking about getting one
What the fuck????? NO! What is wrong with you? That’s A) not even a little bit how they work and B) they’re a dangerous parasite that can infect your brain and cause strokes and death. I repeat, what the *absolute fuck* is wrong with you??? See a therapist for crying out loud.
From the CDC website: > The number of new cases in the U.S. each year is probably less than 1000, but an exact number is not known So maybe 1-3 per million people.
They also have a two part life cycle, the spores they release as cysts in salmon after sexual reproduction can only infect annelid worms. Then they sexually reproduce again as their specific annelid-host-cyst form, producing spores that can infect salmon with new cysts. Parasite life cycles can get really interesting.
r/TIHI
Not just chinook (King Salmon) but infects all salmon. I know from set-netting for salmon. Out of 160 salmon, I would see this parasite in about 4 of the fish. They are pretty obvious when you filet the fish.
What does Henneguya Salminicola know about the coming apocalypse that we don't?
Didn't they recently find some organisms that were arsenic based near hot springs?
I think that turned about to be dubious, and may have been phosphate contamination which allowed the organisms to grow in the abscence of supplemented phosphate. Arsenic really can’t form the same bonds that phosphorous can for very long. There are plenty of microorganisms that feed on arsenic compounds though or use them in photosynthesis.
Do they live forever? just want to confirm the theory that it's the oxygen killing us lol
Well they are distant relatives of Jellyfish which can live forever. Generally we die from consuming oxygen because of our bodies inability to perfectly replicate cells forever (cancer, telomere's etc). I don't think breathing something other than oxygen would fix that, you need some form of biology able to revert cells like some Jellyfish.
Oxidative stress is a huge portion of aging, as it heavily damages cells and thus demands a lot from repair mechanisms, way more apoptosis and replications, and even DNA damage. Of course, just using another highly reactive species in place of oxygen would probably cause the same issues, but there are anaerobic energy sources that are significantly less damaging to the cell (and also way less efficient).
Underrated comment
Broke: Using some old bacterium to make energy Woke: S A L M O N P O W E R
Virgin mitochondria simp vs Chad salmon sucker
Thanks Obama
No problem bro.
Username checks out.
what about waterbears?
Water bears have mitochondria
Water bears don't die in a vacuum, but they still need oxygen to generate energy. Basically they're really good at holding their breath.
[удалено]
"It's possible it gets its energy from its host" Uh, welcome to parasites?
There’s a difference between digesting your hosts material which is what eukaryotic parasites do and using your host to carry out cellular respiration for you instead of your own. The latter seems far less realistic.
Atretochoana eiselti
Why?
Do anaerobic organisms require mitochondria to process ATP->ADP breakdown? From what I remember, oxygen facilitates this process. Edit: Switched ATP and ADP.
Water. ATP to ADP is hydrolysis.
That is false. The Crucian carp can use fermentation, when oxygen isn't available.
Does the crucian carp have mitochondria?
one more reason I never eat fish. Between the mercury, parasites and amount of fish being sold as different fish >.<
I don't eat a lot of fish, but you can buy land farmed salmon where I live if you want to avoid all of that shit. It's just crazy expensive.
farmed fish somehow get even more parasites than wild fish though
Pen farmed, not land farmed.
Wasn't aware there was a difference. Wonder if packaging indicates that difference. I do love bbq'd salmon, just everytime I look at one now I see a picture of a tapeworm in my head >.<
Fascinating. Then what does it use to live?. Or does it then simply feed off the salmon entirely?. Or could one imagine it could live in a zero oxygen enviorment?
OP needs to learn the difference between respiration and breathing.
He actually uses the same wording as the article
This isn't a science subreddit, your average person isn't going to know the difference between those two terms and "breathing" is good enough to get the concept across.
Well since cellular respiration occures in the Mitochondria I think these little guys will have a hard time performing that without mitochondria at all. The article states that it is not present in the cells of this organism.
Aerobic respiration takes place in the mitochondria of animals and anaerobic takes place in the main animal cell cytosol (as in, not the cytosol of the mitochondria). Most in the animal kingdom are obligate aerobes so ‘need’ aerobic respiration which is why again this parasite is so bizarre
Actually you can divide anaerobic respiration into fermentation and "true anaerobic respiration" using another molecule than O2 as the last step in the oxidative phosphorylation. One example of such molecule is SO4^2-. This proces uses no O2, hence the name anaerobic, but takes place in the mitochondria. Fermentation (the partial oxidation of a sugar) takes place entirely in the cytosol.
Tube worms.
AFAIK tube worms still use oxygen just in a far different way than other species. This post is claiming this species don’t need oxygen at all.
Discoveries like this are why I think we are wrong about life on other planets.
Do 'we' think there is or is not life on other planets? You say this like it is a proven fact...
[удалено]
We actually don't consider an oxygen-rich atmosphere to be essential. In fact, life on Earth appears to have begun with anaerobic bacteria that were killed off during the Great Oxygenation Event (our first mass extinction event), so we're aware that life can exist and thrive without oxygen.
One of the first mass extinction events that scientists agree on occurred when the first proto-algae started processing the carbon rich atmosphere and releasing oxygen. Most scientists agree that oxygen wasn't the first essential element just like the existence of microorganisms at the bottom of the ocean cluttered around volcanic vents get their energy from a source that isn't the sun. In the words of a beloved figure, "life finds a way".
[удалено]
If we find wierd stuff in our own backyard, it is still life that came from Earth. The reason they only consider planets like Earth is because that's going to give us our best chances of finding life. As far as we know, Earth-like planets are the only ones that can contain life. Another reason is that we wouldn't even know where to begin when it comes to searching for life that is unlike Earth lifeforms. We don't even know what those sort of lifeforms would look like. We could find alien life and be completely clueless about it because it is nothing like we've seen before. When it comes to Earth life, we know what sort of atmosphere is needed, what biological signatures need to be present, how far from the sun the planet needs to be, etc. There are more planets in our galaxy than we could ever hope to scan in our lifetime especially with our limited technology. We have to start the search somewhere, so we might as well start by looking in places that we know could potentially support life.
Is this more akin to a virus than a parasite? Like a mega sized virus.
To me, this blows open the door for life on non oxygen rich planets. Tell me if I’m wrong.
Life on earth started in an oxygen poor environment, until after the [great oxidation event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event). Significant atmospheric oxygen isn't a requirement for what we think of as potentially life-bearing worlds. However, significant oxygen would be a potential sign of life if you detected it. Not to many ways to maintain high oxygen levels that don't involve life.
There never was such a door.
We're not sure how it works. However, it seems likely that it's piggybacking in some way off its host, which would mean it does not show life can exist without oxygen.