Science Sunday: Mermaids

Warning: Highly Speculative Science Ahead!

Mermaids are awesome, terrifying creatures. Half human, half fish, they either live on rocks and tempt sailors to their doom, or sing songs with their Jamaican crab friends. Either way, mermaids win. But, the coolest thing about them, at least in my opinion, is that they can breath underwater. Who doesn’t wish they could hang around with the fish and the corals, just chilling in the great blue ocean? I definitely do (snorkels are for quitters.)

And now, with the powerful magic of SCIENCE! We’re one step closer to reaching this goal. Or at least, salamanders are…  Apparently algae is the sneakiest little microbe known to man. It has a long history of sneaking into salamander embryos and encoding itself into salamander DNA. Basically this works the same way as a virus does in humans. The algae invades the host and inserts itself between specific sequences of DNA on the salamander’s chromosomes. These sequences are then transcribed again and again via the host’s own RNA polymerase, and transcription mechanisms as the embryo grows, thus spreading the algae DNA throughout the entire body of the Salamander. The invading DNA strand is replicated so many times that it becomes permanent and the mature salamander is able to pass it’s modified DNA down to its offspring. Thus the salamander algae hybrid is born!

What does this have to do with mermaids? Well, the reason that the algae entered the embryo in the first place is because it was eating the Nitrogen sources in the embryo’s poop. The algea, in turn, provided the embryo with more oxygen to grow and develop. This means that algae could potentially provide an internal source of oxygen for future generations of Salamander, and thus future generations of human! It’s a stretch, but viruses already have a history of incorporating themselves into human DNA and modifying us, why not algae? With a little time and, perhaps, an impending threat of an Underwaterworld-esque apocalypse, underwater breathing could be a real possibility! … maybe..

Sources: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/03/29/1018259108
              http://io9.com/5789151/future-humans-with-algae-implants-could-breathe-underwater