23 Enthralling Facts About Microbes That’ll Surprise You – Part 2

The largest virus ever discovered had a size of up to 1.5 microns. The Pithovirus was found buried in Siberian permafrost. It was revived even though it was 30,000 years old and successfully infected cells raising fears that dangerous viruses could emerge from stasis as the climate warmed.

The first virus discovered is the Tobacco mosaic virus, which was over 100 years ago. It causes a mosaic looking disease in tobacco plants. It can survive for years in cigars and cigarettes made from infected leaves. Wendell Stanley won the Nobel Prize in 1946 for discovering that it’s made from protein.

Actinomyces Naeslundii is a bacteria, which resides in the human mouth and is heavily linked to tooth decay and periodontal disease.

The Shope papillomavirus is a virus that can cause rabbits to grow "horns" on their head. This may have led to the myth of the jackalope.

The Wolbachia bacteria can only transmit through female insects. It eliminates males by killing them or turning them female and enables host females to reproduce without males.

Myxobacteria are social bacteria that move and feed in predatory groups. Able to move individually or in large swarms, their method of predation is traditionally called "wolf-pack attack."

The influenza virus that killed 50–100 million people worldwide in 1918 was genetically reconstructed from tissue samples in 2005. The virus is currently held at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.

A species of baculovirus infects gypsy moth caterpillars and essentially turns them into zombies. The virus then forces these Zombie caterpillars to climb to the treetops to die, liquefy and rain on the foliage below to infect others.

The 1968 Pandemic H3N2 virus, commonly referred to as the Hong Kong Flu Virus was an extremely contagious virus with a low fatality rate that originated in China and was widespread in the United States about five months later. It struck in two waves, with the second being more deadly.

In 2016, a strain of Anthrax virus which had been trapped in a reindeer carcass frozen in permafrost for over 75 years in a remote corner of Siberian tundra, thawed and infected around 2000 reindeers and ended up infecting over 20 humans.