Bacteria - Living and eating
Living and eating
Bacteria have survived on Earth for billions of years because they are able to adapt relatively quickly to changing environments. One of the ways they adapt is by having a speedy reproduction rate. Bacteria usually reproduce by simply dividing into two cells. All the genetic information, the DNA, is passed along to each of the cells. Sometimes bacteria reproduce sexually: one bacterium transferring part of its DNA to another bacterium. This allows bacteria to quickly create or pass along new traits that help them adapt to different environments.
Given ideal conditions, bacteria can reproduce about every twenty minutes. That means one bacterium could multiply to more than five billion in about ten hours. If all bacteria really were to reproduce this quickly, the world would soon be overtaken with these microorganisms.
Luckily, in the real world, conditions are never ideal. Once there are too many...
[The entire page is 468 words long]
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