IT’S half a millimetre long and visible to the naked eye. But how did the world’s largest and strangest bacterium get to be so huge? The secret is finally out.
For years after Epulopiscium fishelsoni was discovered in the Red Sea by Linn Montgomery in 1985, no one was sure what it was. Its name means “guest at the banquet of a fish”, as it lives in the gut of surgeon fish.
Given that its volume is up to a million times that of a typical bacterium, Montgomery supposed that Epulopiscium must be a complex cell like those of plants…
