James Smith

of engulfing prey and then killing it depend on interactions that probably wouldn't work with myrobacteria.

Of course they do.

Classic, right?

Yeah.

So I think a lot of protists are unlikely to want to consume myrobacteria.

Even if they could, it's not clear they're going to get much nutritional value from them.

So they might actually evolve away from them rather than towards wanting to do this in the first instance.

So major sources of predation, including infection by viruses, but also consumption by protists or amoebae, are probably not going to happen.

I think eventually, yes, that would happen.

It would probably still take a long time.

So bacteriophage are effectively never going to evolve to be able to do this because they'd have to switch their whole genetic code around.

And that's a massive evolutionary step.

But other predators like protists could eventually evolve to do this.

I think it's actually more likely.

And I should say this is an area where...

the dynamics would be so complex that it's difficult to reason confidently about it.

But I think we can make some guesses.

Protists initially might actually evolve to not want to consume myriobacteria when they're only present at low concentrations in the environment, because they're probably not going to get much nutritional value from them initially.

So the first few protists that accidentally eat up myriobacteria

the myrrh bacteria might end up being toxic to the protist.