In this article on Sea Stars: Scientists solve mystery of West Coast starfish plague | PBS News
(and BTW, they’ve identified the pathogen causing the wasting disease in Pacific sea stars) The writer makes the following claim:
Now, I’m not questioning the number. Viruses are incredibly small, and I get that htat many could fit in a drop of seawater. But are we really accepting that EVERY DROP of seawater contains 10 million viruses? Because that’s just ridiculous to me.
That’s probably the figure for surface waters. Most of the viruses in seawater are infecting microscopic plants and microbes. These are also extremely numerous in a drop of seawater, and when one is infected it will produce a large number of viruses. In less productive waters or in the deep sea, where there are few plants and microbes, the number of viruses is probably less.
Innoculating the ocean is gonna be a bitch.
Well, shit, I guess I should thank the clouds for taking away my beach day!
One number I’ve seen thrown around to put into perspective the sheer amount of viruses is that there are *10 million times *more viruses on earth than there are stars in the universe.
I keep reading this thread title as “viruses in sweaters” which makes me first think “aww!” then “eew!”
I shudder to consider the ferocity of a union between antivaxxers & Green Peace.
We should spread a layer of petroleum on top of it. Exxon, BP , etc are willing to help.
Nah, just gotta boil it for five minutes.
:: looks for matches ::
Gonna happen. Global warming, doncha know?
How about innoculating each of us with a drop of that seawater?
Not a good idea. It’d probably spread the Stupidity virus.
I added that up with the idea that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in all the beaches on Earth and I think I just sprained my left brain hemisphere.
If it’s any consolation, very few of those viruses would be infectious to a human. They’re mostly targeting other sea life (which is also present by the million in that same drop of water).
You’re not the only one.
Why is it ridiculous to you? Realize that humans intuition is extraordinarily bad about reasoning about large and small numbers, and the only way to verify if something like that is reasonable is to actually do the math.
A virus’s mass is somewhere between 10[sup]-17[/sup] and 10[sup]-21[/sup]kg. I’m guessing that like everything else, there are a lot more small ones than big ones, so I’m going to assume something close to the small end (-20). So, 10 million of them would have a mass of 10[sup]-13[/sup]kg, or 10[sup]-10[/sup]g.
A drop of water is about 10[sup]-2[/sup]g.
So, ~1 / 100,000,000 of the mass of seawater is viruses? That doesn’t seem that unrealistic. If we assume that the density of viruses and water is the same (it probably isn’t, but we’re, then if you expand that drop of water to the size of the Houston Astrodome, and clustered the viruses all together, they’d maybe be about the size of a football. Or maybe 1/10 of a football, or a football player. I’m not really working with a lot of precision here.
Right, that’s why I said it’s not the size I’m having trouble with. Vast swaths of ocean are just underwater deserts. I have a hard time believing that the lively parts are really supporting the number of viruses to make that number be true. What could they be replicating in?
Are they? Cite? I’m sure there are places with little macro life, but even absurdly inhospitable places have been found to be teeming with microcellular life.
Other things that are too small to see? Most viruses are bacteriophages, I believe.
It still sounds like you’re using your intuition to reason about things that you can’t see and numbers that are large enough to defy useful application of intuition. Aside from “that’s so many that they wouldn’t fit” math, how else could you judge whether 10 million or 100 billion or seven is a reasonable average number of viruses per seawater drop?
Dude, you’re talking about dihydrogen monoxide injections ?! Nasty stuff, that.