It is easy for children to come up with questions for biologists that none can answer, and that none has even tried to answer.
Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know about their subject. Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
To be more precise, viruses are just made up of proteins and DNA / RNA. Your normal digestion that can handle proteins and DNA/RNA from animals, plants etc doesn't have any more problem breaking down virus proteins into amino acids and absorbing them.
I think the OP was talking about the bacteria that derive non-negligible sustenance from viruses.
>Moreover, our foraging trials demonstrated robust growth in the Halteria population with only chloroviruses as food (rint = 0.66 ± 0.26 [SD], black lines, Fig. 1A), with minimal to no growth in the controls (with chloroviruses filtered out; rint = 0.22 ± 0.12 [SD], blue lines, Fig. 1C). The abundance of the larger Paramecium did not increase in treatment or control trials (Fig. 1D), indicating that not all ciliates can grow on chloroviruses in these conditions, even when they consume them.
How could you possible find a citation for that? It’s not even pretending to be a scientific or totally objective claim. Asking for a citation for this type of statement is no way to have a discussion. Do you not see why?
Eh, 'Citation needed.' was my admittedly somewhat snarky way of calling bullshit.
Most any scientist will happily babble all about the stuff they don't know yet in their discipline, because that's exactly where the excitement lies for them.
> Much of Wikipedia is "curated" by retired professors carefully scrubbing mention of anything new that makes their graduate thesis look ill-conceived.
What makes you think so? What evidence do you have?
Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know about their subject. Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.