Microbes | Smithsonian Ocean

colored vibrio bacteria

a close up of bacteria

Marine Microbes Overview

Curious about the microscopic world? This overview dives into everything to know.

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Featured Content

Screenshot from video showing illustrations of diverse and abundant marine microbes.

Video

The Microbial Loop

A tree that shows the different relationships between bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes.

Interactive

Marine Microbe Tree of Life

Screenshot from video with large kelp leaves floating in the ocean.

Video

A Kelp's Slime

Ocean Food Web Listing Image

Interactive

The Missing Microbial Link in the Ocean Food Web

An assortment of microbe illustrations seen by Leeuwenhoek under the microscope.

Timeline

Milestones In Marine Microbiology

Microbes Articles

Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative researchers collect samples from a Pensacola Beach with oil layers in the sand. They use genomics to track how the communities of microbes change as they digest different components of oil after a spill.

Article

Three Ways You Can Use Genomics to Study Oil Spill Impacts

A screenshot from the video showing red and white tube worms.

Video

Hydrothermal Vent Creatures

a crochet radiolarian

Article

Make Your Own: Radiolarian

A screenshot from the video showing large white tubeworms with red tips on seafloor.

Video

How Giant Tubeworms Survive at Hydrothermal Vents

a large salmon colored orb with tiny fluorescent green and blue orbs covering it

Article

A Bacterium's Super Powers

A view out of the tiny window of the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible.

Article

How Methane Fueled a Food Web after the Gulf Oil Spill

Screenshot from video with researchers on a ship collecting water.

Video

Working in the Dark

Pink crustose algae covers the surface of a rock.

Article

Microbes Help Corals Pick a Home and Settle Down

Thumbnail of expert on Bobtail Squids.

Video

The Bobtail Squid

an image of an underwater vent

Video

Submarine Volcanoes and Hydrothermal Vents

Horizontal bands of color represent different species of lichen that have adapted to the conditions at different heights above sea level.

Article

Seaside Lichens

Tiny bits and pieces of plastic can be found throughout the ocean, like these collected from the open ocean by net.

Article

The “Plastisphere:" A new marine ecosystem