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MADRID - There are plants that digest amphibians, algae that feed on fish or viruses that infect bacteria. But among the relationships between predator and prey there is one that is hardly known and that could be essential in the cycle of life: the beings that eat viruses. The virivores. Although the word does not yet exist, a group of American researchers have discovered two groups of microorganisms that are neither animals, nor plants, nor fungi, but neither bacteria, called ciliate protists, which feed on viruses. Although they are not the first organisms identified that eat viruses, they have proven that they can thrive by feeding exclusively on viral material.
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For the past three years, a group of researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (USA) has been investigating viruses from a different perspective than usual: not as pathogenic biological entities (there is no consensus on whether or not they are living beings), but as basic nutrients in the life cycle. Together with aquatic bacteria, viruses are the most abundant organisms on Earth. Being so many, it is normal that filter-feeding organisms, those that feed by filtering the water, ingest all kinds of organic matter it contains, including viruses. But what John DeLong, a scientist at the American university, has done is to demonstrate that there are at least two types of truly virivorous beings that can live only by eating viruses.
"Several studies had already documented the consumption of...