Two miles beneath the earth’s surface, in a South African gold mine; there’s no light, no oxygen, and no food; only darkness and the heat from the Earth itself. A couple of decades ago scientists would have considered that environ inhospitable to all life. However not only have recent discoveries shown that some bacterial life does just fine and dandy in that sort unwelcoming place, but now scientists have found a fellow they dubbed Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator (the last word is Latin for “Bold Traveler” by the way) who not only lives in that barren place, but does so without any company. This is a one-bacterium ecosystem in and of itself.

Dylan Chivian of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California is the sort of god-awful chap who’ll scrape about 2.8 kilometers beneath the surface of the earth, in the muddy, fluid-filled cracks ‘neath the Mponeng goldmine of South Africa. A name with a nice ring, that; the bilabial plosive just rolls off your lips doesn’t it?

Anyway this rather passionate fellow goes dabbling about in the literally blistering environ, and after filtering 5,600 liters of mine water, he comes up with a sample consisting of 99.9% of one single species of bacteria, the rest being mostly the Berkeley lab’s contaminants.

Hello there, he must have said, this raises an eyebrow or two. No other known life form on this planet lives in total isolation, all of them from scummy bottom-feeder to (some say undeserving) top-of-the-food-chain human depend on one another, it’s called an ecosystem lads.

Yet this audaxviator bug pulls it off. In the nastiest conditions on or under this rock no less. This earned the bacterium its name, which comes from a Jules Verne passage that goes something a bit like “Descend, bold traveler … and you will attain the center of the Earth”. I think the whole Latin taxonomy business is utterly pretentious but at least ‘Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator’ is better than Brachyta interrogationis interrogationis var. nigrohumeralisscutellohumeroconjuncta, who is the poor cerambycid with the dubious honour of being the creature with the longest name in the Standing Nomenclature.

Tangent aside, the audaxviator may provide hints to scientists as to how life could evolve on other planets, even in harsh conditions, even in places with no food, no sun and no oxygen. In fact, put this little muck-dwelling creature on Mars, or on Enceladus (Saturn’s sixth largest moon) and it won’t even feel the differences. If this creature can do without things we take as sine qua non to life, then maybe we need to rethink our definition of what constitutes a planet that can support life. Yes, I’m talking to you Frank Drake