Just outside the town of Cervantes, in Western Australia, there is a lake that doesn’t seem like much at first sight, but it happens to be home to a very precious life form, cyanobacteria. These very primitive bacteria were among the very first life forms present on Earth, more than three billion years ago. They are even thought to be responsible for producing the oxygen that later enabled more complex life forms to thrive on Earth. These colonies of bacteria form globular structures called thrombolites and stromatolites. The difference between…
